Where was everybody? The whole area seemed so still and empty, as if holding its breath. Creepy. The idea of wandering about alone on foot did not at all appeal to her, so she drove around to the rear of the tent complex. There she found a battered old trailer whose once proud chrome skin was scarred, dented, and painted a dull red, sitting far behind the tents and the rest of the show vehicles.
Was this where Doug was hiding? She couldn't see anyplace else that matched the description. Her heart bled for him. What had driven him to these extremes?
She parked her car nose-on to the side of the trailer and noticed that all the windows were boarded over. The door hung open. She called out as she stepped out and approached the dark opening.
"Doug?"
"Nadia!" His voice echoed faintly from the dark interior. "I'm so glad you made it."
"Doug, where are you?"
"Right inside. Come on in."
She felt hackles rising. Something wasn't right here. On the phone his voice had sounded perfectly fine. But here, without the filtering effects of wires and microwave transmissions, it sounded different. It sounded wrong. And then she realized that he had called her Nadia instead of his usual Nadj.
"Why can't I see you, Doug?"
A pause, then, "I'm on the couch. I'd really love to meet you at the door but I'm… I've been injured."
Doug… hurt…
Without thinking Nadia found herself dashing up the two rickety steps and fairly leaping through the door. She stopped inside, looking around, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim interior. The air was mildewy and close despite the open door. She heard a rattling, rustling movement to her left.
"Doug?"
"Right here, sweetie," said his voice to her right—and from below.
She jumped at the sound and turned to see what she thought at first was a child, but then she noticed the mustache and the slicked-down hair. He looked like a midget from a barbershop quartet.
He grinned. "See ya later!"
Nadia watched in mind-numbed shock as the little man darted out the door.
His voice… he'd spoken in Doug's voice.
She was just beginning to move, just going into a turn, when the trailer door slammed shut, plunging her into darkness.
"No!"
The cry was a strangled sound as fear took an instant icy grip on her throat, choking off her air. She threw herself against the door, hitting it with her shoulders, pounding on it, shouting.
"No! Please! Let me out! Help!"
But the door wouldn't budge. She battered it and screamed for help even though she knew the trailer was too far from anything and anyone to hear her cries, but she kept it up until her voice was raw. Then she stopped shouting but kept pounding against the door, fighting the sobs that pushed up from her chest.
She would not cry.
And then she heard that rattle and rustle again from the corner and her frenzied panic turned to cold, cringing dread.
Someone, something was in here with her.
The sounds became more frenzied, and through the thrashing she caught muffled growls and whines, and whistling breaths. Whatever it was it sounded furious, but at least it wasn't coming any closer. Maybe it was leashed in the corner. Maybe—
Cell phone! Yes! She could call for help! She reached for her bag and then realized with a groan it was in the car. Now she truly wanted to cry.
More thrashing from the corner.
God, if she could only see! Slivers of daylight seeping through the boarded-up windows provided the only illumination, and what little there was only made matters worse as her eyes adjusted. Whatever was thrashing in the corner looked big.
Nadia felt around her and found a counter and a sink. She must be in the kitchen area. She found drawers and pulled them open, searching for a weapon or even a flashlight, but all she found were food crumbs and dust.
She turned and felt around behind her. A table and—thank you, God!—a candle, maybe three inches long, in some sort of glass holder. She ran her fingers across the tabletop and knocked something to the floor. Bending she patted around and came up with a plastic cylinder. A lighter.
Her initial joy quickly faded when she realized that light would reveal what they'd locked her up with. But as she listened to the hissing, whining, thrashing thing at the other end of the trailer she knew she had no choice. Not knowing was worse.
She flicked the wheel and held the flame before her. It revealed nothing, but all noise except for the hissing breaths ceased.
Was it afraid? Afraid of fire?
The silence was almost worse than the noise. She didn't know how much butane she had left, so she lit the candle. Then, holding it at arm's length before her, she edged toward the far end of the trailer, moving inches at a time.
And slowly on the right she began to make out a shape… and it was human-shaped rather than animal, stretched out on some sort of bed… and as she moved closer she saw that it was a man and he was bound hand and foot, spread-eagle on the bed… and she saw a mouth sealed with silver duct tape, and above the tape wide blue eyes glistening in the light… She knew those eyes and the sandy hair falling over the forehead.
"Doug!"
The candle slipped from her fingers but she caught it again, barely noticing the splash of hot wax across her wrist as she leaped to his side. She was sobbing as she peeled the tape from his mouth.
"Oh, Nadj, I'm so sorry!" he half gasped, half sobbed. "I had no idea!"
She kissed him. "Doug, what happened? Why are we here?"
"I don't know," he said as she began to work on the knot on his right wrist. "I never got to see whoever snatched me."
"They stole your laptop and smashed your computer."
"Then it's got to be GEM."
"I think you're right."
Admitting that was a spike through her heart.
"I should have left their goddamn computer alone. But why you?"
Nadia had loosened the binding enough by then for him to wriggle his hand free. As he went to work on his left wrist and she tackled his right foot, Nadia told Doug about Loki-Berzerk and her suspicions.
When he was free he gathered her into his arms and she sobbed with relief and terror against his chest. His face was stubbled, his clothes wrinkled and smelly, but he was Doug and he was alive and holding her.
"I had no idea what they were planning when the little guy was talking to me," he said.
"The one who imitated your voice? He… he was uncanny."
"He came in with this big dog-faced guy and started talking to me, asking me if I needed anything and did I know why I'd been brought here. He didn't give me any answers, just kept asking questions. Now I know he was studying my voice."
Nadia studied his face in the flickering light. "Did they… have they hurt you?"
"Not a bit. They bring me food—plenty of it—and water." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. 'There's even a bathroom. Except for tying me up an hour ago, they've treated me pretty decently."
Nadia looked around, not seeing much. "And there's no way out?"
"None. Believe me, I've tried."
She stared at the candle flame. "What if we started a fire?"
"Thought of it, but who's going to send a fire alarm? These folks could probably put it out before anyone noticed, and even if fire trucks did show up, we'd probably be dead from the smoke before they got us out.
"OK," Nadia said. "No fire. Let's stay alive."
"That's what's got me. If what we know is so dangerous, why didn't they simply kill us?"
"If they haven't yet, they probably don't intend to. I can't think of any other reason to keep us safe and dry and well fed, can you?"
He shook his head.
Heartened by the simple logic of her reasoning, Nadia wrapped her arms around Doug and clung to him.
11
Milos Dragovic sat in the rear of his Bentley in sullen silence. The car glided uptown on Park Avenue, a black cocoon of steel-girded stilln
ess amid the midtown cacophony. Pera, his driver, didn't speak—didn't dare. No music and certainly no news. Milos had heard enough news for the day.
Vuk and Ivo dead… he still could not believe it. How was such a thing possible?
He had seen it on the midday news—the burnt-out, bullet-riddled husk of his car, the two bagged bodies being wheeled away on stretchers, and still he could not accept it. And even less the story that it was a lone assailant.
Witnesses said they had seen one man fleeing in a stolen taxi, but Milos knew this could not be the work of a single man. The news was calling the incident drug-related. It was not. These were the same people who had attacked him in the Hamptons. Now they'd moved to the city. This had been an ambush, a well-planned execution carried out with the precision of a military operation.
And that disturbed him the most. To ambush Vuk and Ivo like that, someone had to know they were coming. But Milos himself hadn't known where they were going until moments before he had sent them. This left only two possibilities: either his office was bugged or he had an informer in his organization.
The realization had chilled Milos's rage. If it was an informer, who? He looked at the back of his driver's head. Pera, perhaps? No, anyone but him. Pera had been with him since the gunrunning days. Pera would never.
A bug then? He sighed. Either was possible. After all, Milos had his own sources within rival organizations, even within the NYPD. None of them seemed worth a damn at the moment. His rivals were laughing at him and playing copies of the TV tape nonstop in their bars, but no one, either publicly or privately, was taking credit.
The police were worthless, searching for this so-called lone assailant. They had no good description other than medium height, average build, and brown hair, although some witnesses were disputing the hair color. They couldn't agree on his facial features either except that he'd been scorched by the flames from the burning car—Milos's car.
The police said he'd hijacked a taxi. That taxi was found abandoned in Queens where he'd apparently hijacked a Mercedes. NYPD later learned that while an all-points had been out on the Mercedes, the man they sought was lying unconscious in a North Shore hospital. The local police had considered him nothing more than a drunk driver. By the time they realized that they held a suspect in a far more serious crime, the man had vanished.
Milos wanted to scream: Not one man! He was a decoy, a set up to make it look like one man could take out two of mine! It's all a plot, a conspiracy to ruin me!
But he would be shouting at the deaf. The only ones listening were on the other end of the bugs in his offices, maybe even here in his personal car.
The thought made him hunger for fresh air.
"Pull over," he told Pera.
He got out at the corner of East Eighty-fifth. He saw Pera looking nervously about. He was spooked. Vuk and Ivo this morning… who would be next?
"Wait here," he said, and began to walk east.
He had decided to take the matter into his own hands. If he could not trust his men, his phones, his offices, his cars, that left him with one resource: himself. He would track down his tormentors and personally dispose of them. It was the only means left to him to salvage his honor.
But he possessed only one hard fact about his enemy: the first call from the so-called East Hampton Environmental Protection Committee had come from a phone on the corner of East Eighty-seventh Street and Third Avenue. That was it. The rest—the man in the car in the security video, for instance—was all speculation.
He reached Third Avenue and turned uptown. Two blocks later he was standing before the phone. He would deal soon, very soon, with the man in the video, and perhaps with his woman and child if need be. But Milos needed to do this first. He needed to be in this place, to stand where his enemy had stood and pushed these numbered buttons to dial his number and taunt him.
Why here? he wondered, turning in a slow circle. Why did you choose this particular—?
He stopped when he saw the high-rise co-op. He knew that building. Last fall he'd had one of his men look up the address. He'd barely glanced at the numbers before handing the slip to Pera and saying, "Drive by this address."
But the building was unforgettable… Dr. Luc Monnet's building.
Milos whirled and slammed his hand against the phone booth's shield, frightening an old woman passing by. He turned away before she could recognize him, and cursed himself for not being more attentive, for letting underlings do too much. If he'd been paying attention last fall he would have connected the location of the phone with Monnet last Friday. He could have brought all this to a halt that very night. And then there would have been no second rain of filthy oil, no helicopter debacle, and no humiliating videotape playing and replaying nationwide today.
He canned himself. That was in the past. That was done. He could not change it. But he could avenge himself.
Because it was all so clear now.
Monnet and his partners wanted him locked up and out of the way, leaving them a clear field to tie up all the Loki trade for themselves.
Fair enough. If Milos could have figured a way to produce the drug on his own, he would have cut them out long ago. That was business.
But to humiliate him so publicly. This went beyond business.
And all Monnet's idea, he was sure.
He ground his teeth. Monnet… Milos never would have guessed that prissy, pissy little frog had the turn of mind to conceive such a scheme, let alone the guts to execute it. But here was the evidence, staring him squarely in the face.
Motive and opportunity—Monnet had both.
Listen to me. I sound like a fucking cop.
But it was true. Same for Monnet's brother worms, Garrison and Edwards.
Time to turn the tables. Time to square accounts and balance the scales. Only blood would settle this.
Unfortunately that would mean a shutdown of the Loki pipeline—a slaughtering of the goose that laid the golden egg. Bad business. But his honor demanded this. He could put no price on it.
Besides, he had his millions stashed in the Caymans and Switzerland. Once he settled accounts he would disappear for a while, go abroad for a year or two. This city, this country had now been tainted for him by Monnet and his partners.
Milos began walking back the way he had come. So forget about the man in the security video now. Why waste time with him when he would only lead Milos back here, to the GEM Pharma partners.
The partners… Milos would have to think of a way to settle with all three. And since he no longer could trust anyone, he would have to do it alone.
He walked on, planning…
12
"So, you're a hit man now?" Abe said, sliding the package across the counter.
Jack began peeling the masking tape from the tan butcher paper.
Once he'd pulled himself together on the ride back from Monroe, Jack had told Abe what had happened and what he needed. Abe had dropped him off at his apartment where he'd cleaned up as best he could. He'd put the muddied borrowed clothes aside; he'd return them to Peter Harris with a hundred-dollar bill when they came back from the cleaners.
Then he'd called Gia to explain things. He should have gone over in person but he didn't want Vicky frightened by seeing him scarred, battered, bruised, and burned.
Gia was not a happy camper. Once again Jack's line of work had put her and Vicky in harm's way.
No argument there.
When was it going to stop?
Good question. One he couldn't answer, one he could put off answering a little longer.
He hadn't brought it up, but they both knew that Vicky was alive now only as a direct result of Jack's line of work. Had he been a workaday member of straight society, she would not have survived last summer. He could still draw on that account, but he knew it was not bottomless.
The conversation had ended on a tense note.
Jack put those troubles aside for now. To take Gia and Vicky out of harm's way, a harm named Dragov
ic, he had to focus on the matter at hand. He unfolded the butcher paper, exposing the pistol.
"Looks a little like a Walther P-38."
Abe snorted. "If you should have very bad eyes and left your glasses at home, maybe a little. It's an AA P-98, .22 long rifle."
Jack hefted it, gauging its weight at about a pound and a half. Checked out the barrel: the front sight had been ground off and the last three-eighths of an inch were threaded. Then he picked up the three-inch-long black metal cylinder that Abe had wrapped with the pistol.
"Awfully small for a silencer. Will this work?"
"First off, a silencer it's not. It's a suppressor. You can't silence a pistol; you can only make it maybe less noisy. And will it work? Yes, it will work. It's a Gem-tech Aurora. It uses the latest wet technology that will knock twenty-four decibels off your shots for up to two clips. After that it won't be so good."
"I figure I'm only going to need a couple, three rounds."
"Pretty much takes care of the muzzle flash as well."
Jack shrugged. "This'll be daylight."
"And here's what you should load." Abe plunked a box of .22 LRs on the counter. "Subsonic, of course."
"Of course."
No sense in using a silencer—OK, suppressor—if the bullet was going to cause a racket along its trajectory, a teeny tiny Concorde doing Mach Two and cracking the sound barrier all the way.
Jack noticed the FMJ on the box. "Full jacket?"
"Hollows or soft-points could be deflected going through the wipes inside the suppressor."
Jack grimaced. "Don't want that. And speaking of wipes, can I borrow your gloves a minute?"
Abe reached under the counter and produced a pair of cotton gloves, originally white, now gray with grime and gun oil. Jack slipped them on.
Abe was staring at him. "Those rounds have maybe someone's name on them?"
Jack said nothing. He poured out a dozen rounds and wiped them with the gloves. Then he began loading them into the P-98's clip. He routinely and obsessively collected his spent brass, but in certain situations it simply wasn't possible. In such a case, he didn't want to leave any fingerprints behind.
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