Blood Trust jm-3

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Annika signed to Vasily.

  The big Russian gripped Baltasar by the back of his head and slammed it down and ground it into the smoking pile of bones. Flames leaped into Baltasar’s beard and thick, curling sideburns and he began to yell. No one paid him the slightest attention. Then Annika delivered a vicious kick to his kidney and he fell onto his side. She rolled him onto his back so that he was looking directly up at her.

  “Where is Arian Xhafa?”

  He stared at her, his lips clamped firmly together.

  “You will tell me what I want to know.”

  He smiled up at her. His beard continued to smolder.

  “Vasily, please stay with our friends,” Annika said.

  She signaled to Thatë, who left Alli’s side. He grabbed Baltasar by the back of his collar, and together they dragged him into the woods.

  Jack and Alli stood together, with Vasily’s tattooed hulk.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Jack said in Russian.

  Vasily grunted, but Jack could see that he was grateful. The big man turned and went to scavenge weapons from inside the military vehicle.

  As soon as the car had entered the swale, the driver had doused the lights and, at Annika’s direction, they had exited, sprinting for the safety of the first line of pines. All except the driver, who had switched the lights back on and had set the car in motion with a homemade mechanism that had gradually released the gas pedal, so that the car would slow several thousand yards farther down the straightaway.

  “What will Thatë do to him?” Alli said.

  As if in answer, an unearthly howl pierced the night. It came again. There was nothing human about it, nothing familiar. The third howl made Alli shiver. It was impossible to imagine what kind of creature could make that sound, or what could be causing it.

  Alli made a motion to go into the woods after Annika and Thatë, but Jack put a gentle hand on her forearm.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said.

  She looked at him. “She’ll get what she wants, won’t she?”

  “I believe she always gets what she wants.”

  Alli nodded. “Did you suspect that Thatë was hers?”

  Jack sighed. “I should have.”

  “In retrospect, it all makes so much sense: his position inside Xhafa’s network, his being sent to Tetovo to spy on Xhafa, his commanding an elite group of Russians in Western Macedonia.”

  They saw Annika walking toward them. Thatë appeared out of the pine shadows a moment later. He was cleaning something on a wad of fallen pine needles; they couldn’t see what and Jack refused to speculate on what it might be.

  “I know where Xhafa is,” she told them when she came abreast of them. “I also know where he’s holding Liridona. Unfortunately they’re on opposite sides of the city.”

  Thatë now joined them. There was no sign of whatever he’d been cleaning off, no sign on either of them that they had been interrogating a member of the enemy.

  “These were not Xhafa’s people,” she said to Jack. “They were the Syrian’s.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jack said.

  “I didn’t, either, until Thatë and I convinced this man—Baltasar—to confess. As I told you, the Syrian has stepped into Berns’s shoes and become Xhafa’s arms connection. This has been beneficial for Xhafa because, believe it or not, the Syrian’s access to cutting-edge weaponry is better than Senator Berns’s was. But the situation is now far more explosive. In return for the weapons, Xhafa allows the Syrian to export his particular brand of terrorism all over the world via Xhafa’s private fleet of planes. The Syrian has connections with the Colombian and Mexican cartels, who are moving massive amounts of drugs from Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia for perhaps a half-dozen Muslim extremist organizations who are using the drug money to pay the Syrian for arms. It’s a toxic global network with the Syrian at the center.”

  Jack had to stop himself from calling Paull immediately to tell him how much more dire the situation had become. Arian Xhafa was merely a symptom; the Syrian was the disease. He needed some answers first.

  “What does all this have to do with the Syrian sending a death squad after us?”

  “Let’s get back in the car,” Annika said.

  When they were on their way back to the highway, she said, “For the past four months, the Syrian has been trying to get to my grandfather. Having failed in those attempts, I fear he’s now coming after me as the only other way he can think of to get to Dyadya Gourdjiev.”

  “What does he want with your grandfather?” Alli asked.

  “Dyadya Gourdjiev’s brain. It’s a storehouse of secrets,” Annika said.

  “That sounds pretty vague,” Jack interjected.

  All he got in response was one of Annika’s enigmatic smiles. “Here’s our problem. We need to get to Xhafa and the Syrian as quickly as possible, but the same holds true for Liridona. She’s being held in a safehouse in the western part of Vlorë. The Syrian’s compound is in the northeast.”

  “Which means we need to split up,” Alli said. “Thatë and I will get Liridona.”

  “And I said no.”

  “You haven’t,” Alli said hotly. “Not explicitly.”

  He was about to once again expound on the subject of letting her loose in hostile territory when he caught Annika’s expression, and he remembered their discussion about knowing what was best for Alli. He recalled how he’d bridled when she’d told him that she’d made the decision about what was best for him to know. He tried to tell himself that this was different, but the argument wasn’t holding water.

  He steeled himself for one of the most difficult things he had to say. Difficult because he suspected he knew what Annika’s answer would be. “I promised Alli that she could ask you your opinion.”

  “I think she’s right, Jack. We have two objectives that need to be addressed immediately.” She searched his face. “If you agree with me, I’ll send Vasily with her and Thatë, while you and I go on to the Syrian’s compound.”

  Jack looked from her face to Alli’s. This was an important moment for all of them, there was no question of it. But beyond the operational imperatives, he recognized this as an emotional crossroads in Alli’s development. Despite her defiance and Annika’s arguments, he knew the decision was on his shoulders. No matter her own feelings. Alli wouldn’t go unless he gave her his blessing. In an odd way, he recognized this as the moment when a father gives his daughter to the man she is about to marry. In a very real way, she was passing out of his protection into a world filled with peril, heartache, and exultation. He also knew that she would never forgive him if he forbade her this mission. The intimate bond that had been forged between them would be ruptured and nothing he would ever do or say would restore it.

  He thought of all the mistakes he’d made with Emma and, perhaps inevitably, he felt the cool wind as she settled in beside him.

  —Emma?

  “This is what must happen, Dad.”

  —Do you know? he said. Do you know if she’ll be all right?

  “I’m not a seer, Dad.”

  She had told him that already.

  “But I’ll be with her. I promise.”

  Jack took a deep breath. His gaze on both the women, he said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s roll.”

  * * *

  MORNING IN Washington found John Pawnhill eating eggs Benny at an old-school dive west of Dupont Circle. It was the kind of place where the same people came to have breakfast or lunch every day of the week, the kind of place tourists never heard about.

  In the booth with him was his laptop, which he had hooked into the Middle Bay Bancorp secure server. It amused him no end that InterPublic Bancorp had hired his firm to perform the due diligence on Middle Bay’s books. Of course, he had envisioned an endgame when, following Caroline Carson’s detailed plan, he had set up the Syrian’s cash flow business, via Gemini Holdings and a host of subsidiaries, through Middle Bay. It was just the kind o
f bank the Syrian needed in order to keep from being a PEP (a Politically Exposed Person) like Liberia’s Charles Taylor, high-profile targets like deposed heads of states, paramilitary leaders, heads of drug cartels, and arms dealers like Viktor Bout, all powerful and clever individuals who, nevertheless, had eventually been caught. Caroline deemed Middle Bay a perfect target: large enough to have international connections, but small enough to pass under the radar of the various federal task forces involved in ferreting out terrorist and money laundering operations.

  Pawnhill, Caroline Carson’s eyes and hands on the ground, hadn’t found the actual work all that difficult—she was the genie who lit his way. The American government’s fractured intelligence structure allowed so much illicit international activity to fall between the cracks that you had to make an egregious mistake to come to its attention.

  It was the private sector that gave him the most fits, primarily Safe Banking Systems, a small Long Island company with proprietary software that was incredibly efficient at weeding out international banking transactions like the ones that provided the lifeblood of the Syrian’s organization. God forbid the Feds should start using Safe Banking’s software—he and the Syrian would have to fold their tents and find some other sucker nation through which to siphon illicit transactions.

  Popping a bite of eggs Benny into his mouth, he pressed a key on his laptop and the last of the incriminating data on Middle Bay’s servers was deleted. Next, he remotely ran a program Caroline had created that electronically shredded the deleted files, scrambled them, then overwrote the data again and again until there was, literally, nothing left. Finally, returning to the files from the last five years, he satisfied himself that it was as if the accounts he had opened and used had never existed. There was no gap, no scrap of data, not even a single kilobyte out of place. Satisfied at last, he closed all his programs, put the laptop in sleep mode, and slipped it into its case. He snagged the waitress and ordered fresh coffee, then settled himself to finish his breakfast.

  His mind was hardly relaxed, however. He was haunted by the possibility that Billy Warren, having discovered the Gemini Holdings accounts, might have hit upon their significance. If he had, Pawnhill thought, surely he’d be smart enough to make electronic copies of the files. And he wouldn’t keep them in his office at Middle Bay. The cops, and then Warren’s family, had all been sifting through his apartment. Nothing had been found, which was a tremendous relief, because with all the activity, Pawnhill had been unable to send a team in to do his own snooping.

  He hated loose ends. He also feared them. It was loose ends that invariably tripped you up. He couldn’t afford to be tripped up. He couldn’t afford to allow the Syrian’s dealings to be exposed.

  Ever since the Syrian had started preparations for the assassination of President Edward Carson, Pawnhill had been making contingency plans for the day when they might need to pull up stakes and disappear off the American intelligence radar. When the Syrian had seen which way the last U.S. election was going, he had vowed to have the incoming president killed. The last thing he wanted was a moderate president in power. The previous incumbent, surrounded by his bunkered neocons, had exported American aggression into the Islamic world with such a high degree of religious zealousness that his administration had done much of the Syrian’s work for him. He had never had so many recruits clamoring to strap on packets of C4 and blow themselves up in the name of Islam. “A hated America is a weakened America” was a mantra the Syrian often used in his speeches to the new inductees.

  It had been a dark day when Edward Carson had been killed in a car accident in Moscow. A random event for which the Syrian’s people could not credibly claim authorship without coming into conflict with the Russian government. So, though the Syrian got what he wanted, he didn’t get it in the way he wanted. There could be no propaganda value attached to President Carson’s death, no righteous revenge that could be claimed, and so a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had slipped through his fingers. Not one to dwell on missed chances, the Syrian had set his sights on other ways of bringing misfortune and disaster to the United States. He had sifted through many schemes, finally selecting one that had a particular appeal to him.

  Pawnhill had received an MBA in international accounting from a major American university and then had gained an advanced international finance degree from Oxford. It was at Oxford that he had met the Syrian. Both had been using different names. They had had a brief but intense weeklong affair, after which they had amused themselves by exchanging girlfriends, much as, long ago, kids traded baseball cards.

  Through a series of Gemini Holdings’ subsidiaries set up by Caro, Pawnhill had begun to buy up residential mortgages, package them, and sell them to brokerages and other banks, with the promise of ultrahigh yields. The Syrian had directed Pawnhill to accomplish this utilizing the accounts he had set up in Middle Bay Bancorp. The banks and brokerages, in turn, sold these collateralized debt obligations to their clients.

  It was astonishing to Pawnhill how quickly these CDOs got snapped up. Everyone involved was so busy making obscene amounts of money that virtually none of the institutions bothered to look inside the CDOs to see that many of the individual mortgages had been obtained from first-time homeowners without even a down payment or a check on whether they would be able to afford the balloon payments five years down the road. The few that did bother to look told their clients that they were buying a basket of mortgages so that if one or two failed it wouldn’t matter. The problem was, when the reckoning came, all the mortgages failed.

  By that time, the Syrian and Pawnhill had long since banked their profits, laundering them through the accounts at Middle Bay, and moving them so many times, through Caroline’s maze of offshore accounts and shell companies in various quarters of the world, that they were untraceable.

  Even Pawnhill had had no idea of the scope of the calamity the CDO frenzy would cause. In the aftermath, when the American financial system was on the brink of collapse, when the knives had come out and culprits were being hunted, it had been Pawnhill’s job to keep Gemini Holdings and its now nonexistent subsidiaries from being discovered by Safe Banking Systems, a task far more difficult than dealing with the inept probing of the federal authorities. This was where Pawnhill had earned his money. He’d kept the Syrian off the PEP lists and he’d provided Gemini with an impregnable safe harbor. He was just beginning to accept the Syrian’s congratulations on a job well done when he’d become aware of Annika Dementieva.

  She was the joker in the deck, an element he could not have accounted for because he had known nothing about her toxic relationship with Xhafa. The partnership had troubled him from the first—adding another personality to the mix was always a risk, and especially one as volatile as Xhafa’s—but the Syrian had brushed aside his objections. “I need this man,” the Syrian had told him. “His ambition has made him into the visible one, the leader of a new international organization. And he’s perfect because his terrorists are also revolutionaries fighting for the freedom of Albanians inside Macedonia. It’s a beautiful setup. He’s seen as a hero to others outside Islam, which makes him invaluable. And, if anything should go wrong, he’ll take the heat, while you and I melt away into the shadows.”

  Pawnhill was certain that Dementieva had become aware of the Syrian’s activities through her investigation of Arian Xhafa. But it was only in the last week that he had come upon an ambiguous and seemingly innocuous bit of data. Following it had proved immensely difficult and it had taken him three days to crack. What he discovered had floored him. In some way he could not fathom, Dementieva and Henry Holt Carson were communicating with one another. Curious enough, but what had put the fear of God in him was that the substance of their communication was Middle Bay Bancorp. This intel was so new that he’d not yet had a chance to bring it to the Syrian’s attention. He knew he needed to do so as quickly as possible, but he also knew his boss wouldn’t take it well at all. Therefore, he needed a piece of good new
s to offset the bad.

  He thought for a time while he sipped his coffee, which was black and strong, the way he liked it. The recovery of a copy of the account data from Billy Warren would both appease and please the Syrian. Pawnhill’s discovery of Carson and Dementieva discussing Middle Bay was an extraordinary stroke of luck. But just the fact that they were discussing Middle Bay at all had set off deep-level warning bells inside his head. Though he had long ago used a number of tried-and-true methods to put M. Bob Evrette in his hip pocket, there were always forces outside the bank he might have to contend with one day. For this and many other reasons he had aggressively pursued the forensic accounting assignment with InterPublic. He had done business with them before—another one of his fail-safe measures should he have felt the need to move accounts to a larger bank.

  When the waitress passed by, he asked for a slice of devil’s food cake. It was now possible to take a step back and see the InterPublic buyout of Middle Bay in a different light. The possibility that Carson suspected both the existence of the accounts and their connection with the Syrian and Arian Xhafa sent chills down his spine. By nature, Pawnhill was not prone to panic, but this development had disaster written all over it. This was why he had attacked Middle Bay’s books with such thoroughness, wiping clean not only the accounts themselves, but any electronic footprint their deletion might leave behind.

  Pawnhill finished his cake. Asking for the check, he threw some bills down on the table, leaving his customary large tip, and went out. It was late morning, humid, the clouds yellowish with the threat of a storm coming up from the south. He walked for a couple of blocks until he spotted a cruising taxi and took it to within three blocks of Billy Warren’s apartment. After the crime scene investigators were done with it, Billy’s father had slept there for a couple of nights, further impeding Pawnhill’s access. But now the people Pawnhill had surveilling the building reported that the father was gone. The apartment was empty; it hadn’t been visited in more than forty-eight hours.