by Mike Maden
“And your father works for the government. A high-level bureaucrat, you said.”
“That’s what he’d call it, for sure. It’s kind of an executive position.”
“And your parents are still married?”
“A long time. They’re even in love.”
“How romantic. And rare, I think.”
“It’s a miracle.”
“And you admire them.”
“More than you know.”
“That’s nice.”
And just like that, Jack felt the door shut. They were definitely connecting, but something happened. Did he say something wrong? No, he hadn’t. But for whatever reason, she wasn’t going to let this thing go any further. Jack couldn’t blame her. He was just another American tourist who’d be moving on in another day or two.
And what was he thinking? There wasn’t any way this thing was going to work between the two of them. He was grateful she’d shut this conversation down.
They rode along in a sad, comfortable silence for a while, Jack’s mind turning to the world outside the windshield.
* * *
—
At around noon, Aida finally asked, “Getting hungry?”
“Yeah, sure.” Jack was staring out of his window. Down below, the Neretva River rolled wide and slow between sloping, tree-covered hills.
“I know a place.”
“You’re the tour guide.”
A few minutes later, Aida pulled off the two-lane asphalt and onto a dirt road threading down through the pines and toward the river. A hundred feet later, a chain barrier blocked the way down farther. She put the van in park, hopped out and unlocked the chain, then crawled back into the driver’s seat and continued on.
A few moments later they entered a secluded clearing on the banks of the river, sparkling in the warm sunshine. Aida killed the engine.
“This place you know must deliver,” Jack said, as he opened his door.
“I brought a little picnic for us. Hope you don’t mind.”
She opened the back hatch and pulled a blanket off a small ice chest hidden beneath it.
An ice chest.
Great.
She opened the ice chest. Bottles of frosty cold beer jutted out of the ice.
“It’s Sarajevska brand. Hope you like it.”
Jack pulled one out. “Know it well. Good choice.”
“Thank you.” Aida grabbed the blanket and a basket. “Follow me.”
* * *
—
They set up beside the river in the leafy shade of a paper mulberry tree. She’d put together a spread of sandwiches, a Bosnian version of Greek salad, and fruit. And of course, the beer.
They ate mostly in silence, with a few stolen glances between bites and heaping servings of Jack’s praise for the delicious food. The cold beer tasted great in the gathering heat, and the whispering river looked cool and inviting.
Aida finished her meal and her beer, and stood. “I’m going in.”
She sauntered down to the water’s edge, knowing that Jack’s eyes were tracking her every movement. She stared at the light dappling on the river’s surface for a moment before lifting off her blouse and dropping it by her feet. She kicked off her shoes and slipped off her yoga pants.
Jack’s eyes drank in the curves of her body, a silhouette against the sunlight dancing on the water. A lacy bra and panties weren’t much of a bathing suit, but that was fine by him.
Aida reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. Slipped the straps off her shoulders and turned around, then let the bra fall away.
“Will you be joining me, Jack?”
Uh, yeah.
* * *
—
They played and swam in the river, both naked as the day God made them. But Aida’s play turned to something else altogether when Jack carried her back to the blanket and laid her down.
And Emir watched it all through his binoculars from high on the road, his eyes blurred with bitter tears.
47
ROME
The Hendley Associates Gulfstream jet was parked near a hangar on the far side of the General Aviation Terminal at Ciampino airport, smaller but more convenient than Leonardo da Vinci. By special arrangement, Ciampino operated 24/7 for Hendley aircraft, a critical advantage for short-notice missions like theirs. It was also closer to the city where Dom, Adara, and Midas were chasing down leads on Elena Iliescu and the Iron Syndicate, which presumably employed her.
Trieste had been a bust, and the closest thing to a thread of possible connection between her and the mysterious organization had led them here. Gavin Biery tracked down a cell-phone number that had received a call from Iliescu’s phone the night before she drove to Trieste. The man’s name was Renzo Castelletti, born in Florence, but lately shuttling quite frequently among Rome, Trieste, and Vienna.
At first they assumed the man was Iliescu’s accomplice in the attack on Jack, running intel or interference. But a more thorough analysis of Castelletti’s phone records indicated something else. He was either a traveling gynecologist doing international house calls or, as Gavin reported breathlessly, “an honest-to-goodness authentic Italian gigolo,” judging by the disproportionate number of women he spoke to and visited with on a regular basis.
Castelletti’s cell phone was currently pinging off a cell tower near Rome’s Westin Excelsior hotel. Gavin hadn’t been given permission by Gerry to break into any private cell phones of people who weren’t demonstrably guilty of any crime, but he was allowed to build an algorithm that allowed him to vacuum up cell-tower data and match it to simultaneous cell-phone usage. When two parties were both pinging on cell towers at the same time, Gavin’s second algorithm sorted for length of phone call. When two calls lasted for the same exact length of time, he presumed they were speaking with each other. Gavin’s magic math tricks, as Dom referred to them, led the team to the Westin Excelsior, where they would be arriving soon.
* * *
—
After refueling and inspecting the plane earlier, Lisanne sent the two pilots to a local hotel with a Hendley Associates account. She opted to stay behind for a few more hours, taking advantage of the onboard computer and satellite link. She needed to catch up on her paperwork and check for the necessary documentation and other arrangements for the three cities where Gavin thought they would be heading after Vienna, their destination tomorrow.
Lost in her work, she was completely unaware of the airport customs officer standing at the foot of the stairs.
“Mi scusi,” he called up.
Lisanne glanced up from her work, a little rattled by the voice. But when she saw the young, handsome Italian in his crisp new uniform and armed only with a clipboard, she relaxed.
“Yes?”
“I need to inspect your plane.” The officer stood in the cabin doorway now, flashing a disarming smile.
If she had been in a cozy little piano bar, Lisanne would have been flattered. Tempted, even. But she was on duty.
“We were cleared this morning.”
“Sì, sì. But my boss, he says take another look. I’m sorry.” He grinned and shrugged while flashing his hands. A gesture of infinite regret but also official inevitability.
He was awfully handsome. What would it hurt? She relented. “Knock yourself out.”
“Grazie.”
The man stepped in, consulting his clipboard. He pointed at the cockpit. “Okay?”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“Of course. Just a formality.”
Lisanne turned back to her workstation. She sniffed the air. Whatever sweet, leathery cologne he was wearing was having its desired effect. She stole a sidelong glance at him. She was on duty, but she wasn’t dead.
He cut a dashing figure in his uniform, for sure, from the top of his high-peaked ca
p to the bottom of his shiny, patent-leather shoes.
His shoes.
The wrong shoes.
Lisanne drew her SIG Sauer micro nine-millimeter from the holster beneath the table, but she was too late. The man batted the pistol out of her hand and lunged for her throat. She let him in close enough to throw a fierce uppercut into his clenched jaw. It wasn’t enough. His eyes watered as he grunted, but his powerful hands still found her neck.
She couldn’t breathe, let alone scream, as his weight bore down on her, pinning her against the desk. She reached behind, her hands desperately searching for something, anything—
She jammed the scissors into his left ear. He screamed in agony and clutched at his wound, releasing her. She threw a hard elbow into his face, toppling him backward.
She turned and ran toward the back of the cabin, diving to the floor where she thought her weapon had clattered to a halt beneath one of the seats. She reached back until she finally wrapped her hand around the pistol’s walnut-grained handle, then rolled onto her back into the aisle, flipping the thumb safety to fire.
But her bladed sights were pointed at empty space.
The Iron Syndicate assassin was gone.
What about the others? She had to warn them. She grabbed her phone and punched Dom’s number.
No answer.
NEAR TJENTIŠTE, REPUBLIKA SRPSKA, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
“Slowly, brothers! Carefully!”
The Syrian captain kept a wary eye on the two big Bosniaks muscling up the first two-hundred-pound missile into the BM-21 Grad launch tube. The four spring-loaded stabilizer fins were strapped against the fuselage so that the missile could fit inside the tube, but as soon as the rocket motor fired, the straps were burnt away, and the fins deployed upon exiting the tube. A simple, analog solution to a complex problem. Russian design genius at its practical best.
Brkić could hardly contain his excitement watching the first missile loading, a bullet being chambered into an assassin’s forty-round revolver. This was the first step on the journey that would lead to the end of the humiliation of his God and his people, first in Europe and then throughout the world. A journey Brkić would take without Red Wing’s permission, because Red Wing was only an arrow in the quiver of the Almighty, whose plans were never thwarted.
True to his word to Red Wing so many years ago, Tarik Brkić—then known as Rizvan Sadayev—remained in Bosnia after the war ended, married a local Bosniak woman, and became a citizen of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, biding his time until the next opportunity to strike.
And that time was now.
When Red Wing contacted him with the plan to initiate a civil war to defeat the Unity Referendum, Brkić gladly accepted, on condition that Red Wing would give him access to his smuggling routes so that guns, drugs, and jihadi fighters could be brought into the region and transported farther north into Europe as needed.
Causing a civil war through false-flag operations was a tried-and-true tactic of governments everywhere; Red Wing’s own government had done it successfully in Syria only recently. There was no question that Red Wing’s plan would work, but to what end? A civil war would end in the partition of Bosnia—itself a creation of the Western powers, designed to keep Muslims in the region under control. Muslims across the Balkans could form a new, larger Islamic state in the heart of Europe. But what would happen then? At best, neutralization by NATO and Russia, fearing the contagion of Muslim self-governance across the Eurasian continent. Or worse? The extermination of Muslims altogether.
It wasn’t enough for Bosniaks to free themselves, or for Muslims in the Balkans to unite. Red Wing’s government promised to protect them, but it was clear that his government’s ultimate goal was to control them.
The only way to protect Muslims from the two great power blocs was to destroy those blocs. But how? Even now, NATO and Russia were killing brothers all over the planet. Fundamentalist Islam—the kind Brkić practiced—was on the run.
Brkić knew that only NATO and Russia were strong enough to stop the other. His plan would result in a war between NATO and Russia, and such a war would result in the downfall of Red Wing’s government as well.
The destruction of the great powers would pave the way for true Islam to take leadership of Europe first, and then of the world, and, ultimately, the world to come.
Inshallah.
ROME
The woman in the fifth-story corner window across the street from the Westin Excelsior had eyes on Dom, Adara, and Midas as they entered the hotel. She was on the phone with her contact in Vienna.
“Any minute now,” she said, and smiled.
* * *
—
Dom, Adara, and Midas strolled through the hotel like they owned the place, knowing full well that the crowded lobby was under constant surveillance by the ubiquitous security cameras tastefully concealed in the ceilings and corners throughout the building. That knowledge was strangely comforting to a team that didn’t want to be discovered, because it was that security system that would enable them to complete their mission tonight. Gavin’s remote search of the hotel security system two hours earlier had paved the way for them in two important ways.
First, thirty minutes before the team entered the hotel, Gavin “spoofed” the live camera feed, replaying footage from two hours prior. No one casually monitoring the system would notice anything but the usual anonymous traffic of guests and hotel employees circulating throughout the hotel. Nothing live was currently being shown or recorded, including the movements of Dom, Adara, and Midas.
The second way the hotel’s own security system aided their efforts tonight was in locating their target. Hacking past the hotel’s civilian-grade firewall was a piece of cake for the wily IT genius. With a picture of Renzo Castelletti in hand, Gavin’s search algorithm easily traced the Florentine’s steps from the lobby to the elevators and finally to room number 3407, where he was greeted by the registered guest, a large and welcoming middle-aged real estate broker from Franklin, Tennessee.
With that, it was simple enough for Gavin to secure the computer guest check-in file and recover the RFID chip code embedded in the woman’s room card. He then sent that code to a MIFARE Pegoda II 13.56 megahertz RFID reader-writer device stored for just such a purpose on the Hendley Associates Gulfstream. Adara cloned three hotel key cards for room 3407 and passed out two to Dom and Midas before heading to the hotel.
The three of them exited the elevator on the third floor. The hallway was empty. Midas dialed the Florentine’s cell number lifted from Elena’s phone address book, and proceeded to walk past 3407 just as Castelletti’s phone rang. That was all the confirmation they needed that he was still in there.
They doubled back and approached the room. Muffled groans and shrieks rumbled behind the heavy door.
Midas nodded to the room-service tray on the floor next to the door, littered with three drained bottles of Collalto Prosecco Brut, a heaping mound of shucked oyster shells, and a couple empty tins of Iranian caviar.
“They’re not doing Bible study in there,” Midas whispered in his comms. “I hope you kids don’t blush easily.”
Checking to make sure the hallway was still clear, they pulled on ski masks and gloves and pulled their weapons, then keyed the door and rushed in as quietly as possible, heading for the bedroom, expecting total surprise and no resistance.
They were half right.
Neither Castelletti nor the woman offered any resistance. They couldn’t. Their naked corpses lay tangled in the blood-soaked sheets, their throats slit ear to ear. The fat woman’s wrists and ankles were tied by silken cords to the bedposts, a silver and jeweled Venetian Carnevale cat mask still fixed to her face.
Adding to the macabre surrealism of the moment was the porn movie groaning and shrieking in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound on the bedroom’s widescreen television.
<
br /> Surprise.
Their only lead to Elena Iliescu was gone.
“Now what?” Adara asked.
Dom nodded toward the door. “We get the hell out of here—fast.”
* * *
—
As soon as they cleared the lobby, Dom called Lisanne. He filled her in on the carnage they had found, and the loss of Castelletti, their only lead.
“Just glad you’re okay,” was all she said. “I was about to call in the cavalry.” Dom and the others had silenced their cell phones for the op. She told Dom about the syndicate hitter and the stainless-steel earache she had given him.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” the former combat medic said. “I’m keeping his hat for a souvenir.”
On the drive back to the hangar, the four of them discussed options on speakerphone. The attack on Lisanne and the elimination of the Florentine meant they were on the right path. The only question now was: Stay put and try and flush the syndicate out, or move on?
The syndicate must have known that Lisanne had filed the flight plan for Vienna. Trying to kill her and possibly destroy the plane meant the syndicate didn’t want them going there. Staying put was also inviting another attack, and probably not by an unarmed singleton.
So Vienna it was.
48
MOSTAR, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
After sating themselves on the riverbank, Jack and Aida packed up and continued the drive along the winding road. They paid more attention to each other than to the local scenery, Aida pointing out less and less until they reached Mostar, jammed with spectators for the Red Bull Cliff Diving competition from the city’s fabled bridge, famous for local talent diving off it for cash tips from tourists.
Mostar was crowded and hot, and after a quick walking tour of the Old Town and a gander at the bridge jumpers, they headed to a four-star hotel for a light dinner and even hotter sex than before.