by P. J. Nash
Etherington logged onto the The Bazaar. Most days, he had to convince himself that all of this borrow was just a computer game. But he knew at the back of his mind it was all too real. He was an internet fan and believed strongly in the freedom of the web. But he also knew it had a horrific downside. He clicked into the Bazaar.
‘Geez Louise,’ he said to his partner, Special Agent Fielding, ‘Better pay for a view and see if it it's genuine.’ Thirty minutes later, they knew it was genuine. "
‘Better call Prague,’ said Fielding.
Sheraton Hotel, Hong Kong
James was freshly showered and clothed. Johnson was back from a discreet medical centre where the bruising caused by his Kevlar vest had taken the brunt of Bain's shot. Both men clutched large glasses of whiskey, even though it was only just past ten in the morning. Neither had slept, the former still not quite believing that his nemesis was in mortuary freezer drawer a few blocks away, the latter that he'd taken a 9mm handgun slug in his chest at point blank range and lived to tell the tale.
As if things couldn't get weirder, Chan had turned up with three bodyguards and a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, along with a holdall containing Bain's possessions.
‘Good Morning, gentlemen. I have something for you,’ he said, unlocking the case from his wrist and placing the case on the table. One million dollars in bearer bonds. Last night, the Australian government confirmed the DNA swabs that were tested from the corpse confirmed it was Cyrus Bain.’
James said nothing.
‘Fuck me pink,’ said Johnson, looking into the case.
‘I suggest we give Mrs Collins 750 grand and you take the other 250. I'll slip Toohey a little something too,’ James said.
Johnson looked astounded. ‘But what about you?’ he asked.
‘I got what I wanted,’ said James.
Outside Honza Lorenc’s flat, Zizkov, Prague
The estate agents might be talking about Zizkov as an “up and coming” area, but the gentrification of the area by expats hadn't reached this street yet. Porn shops and Vietnamese alcohol stores jostled with cheap all-day bars and clothes shops. Graffiti clung to every available surface, and rubbish was strewn in alleyways. The profusion of homeless people gathered on street corners drinking, smoking and rifling through waste bins had allowed Jiri to infiltrate plain clothes officers around the flat with no worries of them standing out. They had seen Honza go back into his flat in the early hours after his late-night prowl looking for new footage.
Jiri stepped from the car and unholstered his Glock 17. Three officers were waiting, one holding a sledge hammer, the others shotguns. There would be no polite knock at the door. Cyber criminals were infamous to the lengths they would go to in destroying evidence, even as the cops arrived at the door. Jiri pressed his bleep button on his personal radio three times; the signal for the team at the read that he was going in. The officer with the sledge hammer swung at the door. It bounced off. The door was reinforced. Jiri and the other officer stood back. The shotgun boomed three times, the Hatton rounds blowing off the hinges. The officer hit the door again, and it collapsed inwards.
Jiri ran in gun up and shouldered in the interior flat door. Honza had been shaken from his sleep by the shotgun blasts. He saw a huge black shadow burst through the door and grabbed for his flick knife. As he reached down, Jiri upended his gun and smashed it into Honza’s nose. When he collapsed to the floor, Jiri kicked him in the chest and sent him sprawling across a table which broke under the impact.
Jiri put a boot on his chest and pointed his pistol between Honza’s eyes. ‘Police, we want to speak to you about your video collection.’
Incident Room, Smichov Police Station, Prague
‘So, he's confessed?’ asked Sandersen.
Jiri lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘He's cuffed to a chair wearing nothing but his shorts with a splint on his broken nose. He'd confess to the St Valentine’s day massacre, if we asked him,’ said Jiri with a laugh. ‘But, yes, he said he'd been out stalking women for his site when he saw the guy and woman. He filmed them and has put it up for sale on The Bazaar.’
‘Snuff movie?’ asked Sandersen.
‘Exactly he was asking for fifty thousand US dollars for it. Even on that site it was rare,’ he said, taking a drag on his cigarette.
‘Think we better watch this video of his, then?’ said Sanderson.
‘Suppose we better.’
They watched it on Jiri’s laptop. Both were hardened to this kind of horror. But, still, the turn from lust to killing was a real stomach churner. Although the woman was slight, the strength with which she stabbed the victim was surprising to them. This visually confirmed the findings from the autopsy which has shown the blade of the knife had actually scraped bone on the victim’s rib cage.
‘One more time and I'm calling it a night,’ said Jiri. They watched the video again on a third of the full speed.
‘Wait, stop. What's that there? She's looking at the camera, I'm sure of it,’ Jiri watched closely.
‘Jesus and Maria. You're right.’ They both looked each other.
‘She saw him. Do you think she knows where he is?’ asked Jiri.
‘You know, and it's a gut instinct, I think she does,’ replied Sandersen.
‘Then, Mr Lorenc is our fly in the spider web. I’ll let him go right away,’ said Jiri
Dave Spink’s Office, Melbourne
‘Ok, Mal, that's shit news, but at least we know,’ said Dave Spinks, as he leant back in his office chair. He digested the news of Bain's death as he looked around the spartan office which boasted nothing but a desk, a filing cabinet and a large-scale map of the Melbourne metropolitan area. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a Rome Y Julietta cigar from a tube, bit off the end and lit it with a match.
‘The King is dead. Long live the King,’ he said to himself. He felt a heady mix of triumph and trepidation. At fifty-five, he could take two paths. As Bain's loyal lieutenant, he had the foot soldiers, the cash, the weapons and the connections to make a hostile takeover of the whole operation. It would mean killing a few, at least. And it would mean attention from the cops. Save for a short stint in youth custody, he had avoided jail. Option two was sell up and retire with a few million bucks and say goodbye to it all.
‘Fuck it, I'm gonna take the hard route,’ he said it himself. He grabbed a pad and wrote down the names of three men who stood in his way. He pulled a fresh mobile phone from drawer and punched in a number.
‘Mal, round up the boys. We gotta make hay while the sun is shining. And break out the heavy artillery, we’re gonna need it.’
He smashed the phone on the desk and broke up the SIM card. Then, he picked up the receiver of his landline and dialled his travel agents and booked a flight. It was the second time that day he'd called them. Earlier that day, he'd booked Irish a flight from Hong Kong to Prague. A little matter of revenge. But before that, he had a funeral to attend.
Incident Room, Smichov Police Station, Prague
Using Honza Lorenc as bait was, of course, highly unethical. But beggars couldn't be choosers. And they were definitely in the former category. There were two big stumbling blocks in the case, as far as Sandersen could see. First, the almost total lack of evidence. Sure, they'd got the bodies and the film. But all it really confirmed was that she was female and physically powerful. They had no DNA, no witnesses, apart from Lorenc, and he was now facing charges that would not make him viable as a witness. The lack of evidence was also compounded by the lack of CCTV. Forty years of communism had made the Czechs loathe to being filmed and tracked. Whilst there was some CCTV, it had not reached the saturation levels of places like the UK. The killer obviously knew the transport city well. She either chose out of the way stations in the suburbs or cleverly hid her trail when being in the city centre.
Secondly, the way they would pursue a case with a male killer would have been different. They would have databases of past and presen
t offenders and a list of possible suspects. Put simply, most serial killers were male and their victims, female. Of course, they were trawling the cases of female rape victims. But as so much sex crime went unreported, this was no more than grasping in the dark. When she was young, Sandersen had read a book by Jim Corbett about how he went after man-eating tigers in India. Corbett would stake out a tethered goat and wait for then man eater to find the easy prey. This was what, however unpalatable as it might be, what they had to do to catch her.
Fawkner Memorial Park, Melbourne
The media and the celebrity gawkers alike were out in force as Melbourne’s most infamous villain since Ned Kelly was laid to rest. A host of bikers from the Plantagenet’s outlaw motorcycle gang were running the security. The burly, bearded patched bikes contrasted sharply with the closely trimmed grass and numerous headstones and memorials that were set out in serried rows.
The funeral cavalcade swept in, the hearse escorted by two massive Harley Davidson bikes. Following in its wake, a column of long, black limousines. They pulled up and out got the great and the definitely not good of the Melbourne underworld. Clad in his finest dark suit and wearing designer sunglasses was Dave Spinks, acting as principal mourner. He walked to the graveside as four bikers hefted the coffin across to the recently dug grave. Scuffles broke out on the perimeter as the paparazzi pushed forward to snap Cyrus Bain being put under the sod. A particularly keen pap was grabbed in a headlock, and his camera snatched from his neck, and the memory card crushed in a meaty paw.
Apart from a half a dozen uniform officers on the main drive, Victoria’s finest were keeping a low profile. From the Commissioner to the rank and file, most were quietly happy that Bain had met a violent and untimely end. Let the gangsters have their little soiree. But amongst the more cerebral cops, there was a lingering worry of who would fill the vacuum after Bain’s demise. The assembled criminals and ubiquitous goons stood solemnly around the grave and laid floral tributes. From their eyrie on the roof of the crematorium, the plain clothes cops shot stills and video of the gathering through long-range lenses. They were working out who had attended and therefore declared their loyalty to Dave Spinks as the de facto leader of the Redbacks gang. And those who had not attended and paid tribute would be making their plans and loading their weapons.
Sheraton Hotel. Hong Kong
James was seated at the desk in the hotel room. The muted TV showed coverage from Fawkner Memorial Park. The TV news programme had hired a couple of talking heads to give their five cents worth. One was an ex-cop saying that Bain’s empire and the takeover by the Redbacks of the Melbourne underworld was redolent of Victoria Police’s incompetence and lassitude. Another one said that the demise of Bain was likely to lead to more shootouts and murders as rival gangs fought it out. James had his money on the latter
The former was a university professor who dealt with statistics and algorithms. He’d never seen a hardened criminal take aim with a gun and pull the trigger on him, with no more thought than swatting a house fly.
James was an old-fashioned copper. He’d joined the police to put bad guys away. But that clarity of purpose had been blunted after he’d seen how the criminal justice system had stacked the odds in favour of the criminal. James didn’t want to rip up the rule book; he wanted to beat the criminals to death with it. For James, Bain was a mad dog who needed putting down. Plain and simple. It was here he and Sandersen diverged. She argued monsters were made, not born. Killing killers stopped you from studying their motivations. Oddly enough, he didn’t favour a return to wholesale capital punishment, just that some criminals needed a bullet in the head and not prison. His mind flashed back to the balcony. Had Bain been going to put his hands up or going for a concealed weapon? He wasn’t sure. Self-defence or execution. It didn’t really matter.
‘As long as your conscience is clear,’ Sandersen had said during a long telephone conversation. There was a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ said James. A waiter had a bottle of Isle of Jura in one hand and a sheaf of newspapers under his arm.
‘Thanks,’ said James, tipping the waiter. He walked over to the desk and riffled through the newspapers. “Mobsters Pay Respects to Fallen Gang Boss” was The Age’s headline. The Herald Sun headline read, “Bye Bye Bain City Bids Farewell to Crime Boss”. James poured himself a slug of Jura and took a sip. Scanning the papers, he allowed himself a chuckle as he read that Bain had been shot after a SWAT-style raid by a gang of highly-trained assassins.
‘Because all highly trained assassins use Purdeys,’ he said to himself. Then, it hit him … Bain was actually dead. It was over. It was like curing a headache you didn’t realise you had.
Andel Apartments, Smichov, Prague
Jiri was on stakeout at Lorenc’s flat with a team of other cops. Sandersen felt deadbeat, but her mind had been buzzing, so she’d decided to walk the half mile or so back to the apartment she’d rented in the heart of Andel. She liked Prague and had got confident on the metro and trams. People were pretty friendly, and the streets were safe for women to walk in, she felt. Dusk was just falling as she navigated her way through the tram interchange and through the archway. She was looking for her keys when she saw a man in the shadows. Instinct told her something was wrong, and she decided instantly to make it to the safety of the other side of the road where more people were walking. But a car with no lights on suddenly swerved into her path, bumping into her thigh. She moved back into the entrance. A pair of strong hands grabbed her from behind. Something was clamped over her mouth and in her heightened state of fear, she could do nothing but breathe in the vapour from the cloth.
The world swam, her vision faded, and her knees buckled. She went out like a light. The man bundled her into the car got in behind her, and the door slammed. The driver reversed out and pulled back into the traffic. It had gone perfectly. Apart from the traffic cop who’d been smoking over the road and noticed the plates of the car, radioing it in.
Outside Honza Lorenc’s flat, Zizkov, Prague
Jiri was in the car half asleep and took another swig of lukewarm coffee. Jezek was on duty lingering at the newspaper kiosk on the corner. Nothing much had happened over the previous six hours, and Jiri’s mind had wondered over the facts of the case and how the killer had gotten around the city so easily. He had hit a wall and wasn’t quite sure what was happening.
He snapped out of his musings when he saw a group of Roma teenagers shambling down the street. They were making a lot of noise and were clutching cans of beer and smoking joints. One of them bumped into an old man and pushed him. There was an altercation. Three men across the road ran over and joined in. A mass melee broke out quickly. A young Roma was punched to the ground. The others ran off, and the three men began kicking the young guy lying on the floor.
A fight was something Jiri could ignore, but a three-on-one stomping was something he couldn’t. Slipping his pistol from his shoulder holster, Jiri stepped out of the car, weapon raised, and began shouting at the men. Jezek also ran across, his gun out.
Inside his flat, Honza saw the cops. He had known the cops were out there, he just hadn’t known where. He grabbed the sports bag he had hastily packed and bolted down the fire escape. The cops were distracted. Unfortunately for him, the young woman wearing a hoodie across the street had seen him too.
Honza jogged into the backstreets and, a few minutes later, stopped to catch his breath and smoke a quick cigarette. Cupping the flame his lighter over the cigarette, he leant forward. A shadow moved behind him. His head exploded in a flash of light, and he fell to his knees. A young woman stood over him holding a cosh in one hand. She nudged the prone man with the toe of her trainer, checking he was out cold. A hand under his nose told her he was still breathing. The cosh went back into her pocket. From another pocket came a roll of duct tape. She taped his hands behind his back, did the same to his legs and dragged him inside a doorway. She pushed his feet in and then slammed the heavy steel door shut.
Sandersen woke up with an awful taste in her mouth. She was lying on a mattress. A quick wriggle about told her that she was chained by one ankle to a steel loop buried deep in the masonry of the wall. A door was on the other side of the room. It looked like thick steel and had no handle on the inside. She saw a bottle of water had been left next to her. She took a swig and sloshed it around her mouth. She spat it out on the floor and then drank some more. The door swung open, and two men in boiler suits and balaclavas came in. One was holding a pistol and the other one, more bizarrely, a video camera and a copy of that morning’s Czech daily newspaper, DNES or Today, in English.
‘Ok bitch, we’re gonna make a little video that we’ll send to your fancy man, so he can give us our fucking money back,’ the man with the video camera said.
Bukowski’s Bar, Zizkov, Prague
Jiri had fucked up, and he knew it. There was no way Jezek was going to put the knife in. He would sit here listen to his boss’s whingeing and soak up the booze he was paying for.
‘What was I supposed to do? Let them beat him to death?’ asked Jiri, taking a pull on his beer.
Jezek did the same, looking into his beer glass for inspiration. ‘No, you couldn’t have let that happen. Look, boss, you did your best. The toerag got away,’ said Jezek.