by Robert Brown
“Do you know how little time we have to grab the main man red-handed?”
“How do you know he’s going to be there?”
“I don’t. But we’ll get the hacker. Without him, they won’t be able to do shit.”
Heinrich took the winding road at top speed, screeching around the corners and hogging both lanes. Thalia didn’t protest, though she made a show of buckling her seat belt.
A police siren wailed behind them.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Oh, great,” Heinrich grumbled as he looked in the rearview mirror. One of the police cars that had come up to Mistra was in hot pursuit.
“What did you expect?” Thalia asked. “We’ll need the backup anyway. Um, you’re bleeding on the car.”
“Sorry. Guess that medic isn’t too good at his job.”
Sirens wailing, the cop car followed them all the way to town,. Once it tried to cut them off, but because there was only one pursuit vehicle, the police could not box them in.
“What if the guys up on the mountain warned their boss?” Thalia asked.
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. I don’t think they did because Biniam sent that message after we had nailed them. If they had sent a warning before chasing us, I don’t think the hacker would have stayed put.”
That reminded Heinrich to check his phone before they got into the built-up area and he needed both hands on the wheel in case another cop car appeared. Checking his phone, he found a notification from Biniam from five minutes earlier.
“They’re still online,” was all it said.
“We’re in luck,” Heinrich told Thalia as he shoved his phone back into his pocket.
“Won’t that siren warn them?”
“Hmm, good point. They hear that and they’ll get jumpy. All right. We’ll stop a couple of blocks away. You slow them down while I make a run for it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You just shot two guys and you’re not up for this?”
“How the hell did I ever get tangled up with you?”
“I was trying to pick you up at the collectors’ fair, remember?”
“If this is your idea of a date, I can see why you’re single.”
“Ouch. So are you going to help?”
“Of course.”
“I knew there was a reason I picked you up.”
“Tried to pick me up.”
Heinrich shook his head. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
They drove into town, Heinrich slowing so as not to endanger anyone. The cop car, sirens still going, pulled up close behind them.
“They must be confused about what we’re up to,” Thalia said.
“Maybe that will keep them from Tasering me when I run for it.”
When they were a couple blocks away from the Internet cafe, Heinrich pulled to the curb and leaped out of the car, sprinting away. The cops screeched to a halt and, thankfully, turned off the siren.
Heinrich glanced over his shoulder and saw Thalia standing in front of the police car as the two officers got out. She shouted something in Greek.
He didn’t stick around to hear what she said.
A left down a side street, then a right on another street, dodging past curious passersby, and the sign for the Internet cafe came in sight. He didn’t slow down as he ran through the open door, knocking down the Chinese proprietor, who was just coming out. Heinrich spotted the rich guy from the Mercedes at one of the computers lining two walls of the small room.
No one else was in the room except two teenaged kids playing a video game.
Leader and hacker all in one, Heinrich thought. It’s about time my luck changed.
The sound of his rude entrance and the squawk from the Chinese guy alerted the antiquities gang leader, who sprang to his feet.
Seeing Heinrich, he turned to grab at the power cable of his computer.
Heinrich dove for him and slammed him against the far wall before he could turn off the machine.
The gang leader tried to reach into the inside pocket of his suit, but Heinrich drove a fist into his belly, doubling him over.
He glanced at the computer and saw a database on the screen. On the upper left corner, Heinrich recognized the logo of the Greek Ministry of Antiquities.
Reaching into the man’s suit, he fished out a pistol, tossed it onto the table, gave the guy another gut punch, and shoved him out the door. The astonished teens and the Chinese owner got out of the way just in time.
Heinrich threw the man onto the pavement, kicked him in the face, and planted a knee on his neck.
“Where’s my hundred euros, you piece of shit?”
He rummaged through the guy’s pockets and pulled out a wallet. He counted out a hundred euros—barely a tenth of what was inside—and tossed the wallet back in the guy’s face.
The sound of running feet made him look up.
Two cops, gripping their nightsticks, stopped right in front of him.
Heinrich suddenly saw the scene from their eyes. A foreigner was kneeling on the neck of a Greek man. The guy’s wallet lay on the ground and the foreigner was gripping a wad of bills in his hand.
The situation didn’t improve when the Chinese guy and the teenagers started a rapid-fire account of Heinrich’s escapades in the Internet cafe.
Thalia ran up.
“That’s him!” she shouted in Greek.
The cops swooped in. Heinrich leaped back.
And the cops began beating the living daylights out of the businessman.
“Whoa! Now that’s some police brutality I can get behind,” Heinrich said, laughing.
“Adonis gave them a description and told them he had fired on some police officers in Athens,” Thalia explained.
Heinrich shook his head as the businessman curled up on the street under a rain of blows.
“Nothing cops hate worse than a cop killer ... or a wannabe cop killer anyway.”
Once the police had finished “subduing the suspect after he resisted arrest,” there followed more questioning, the erasure of the phone of one of the teenagers who had tried to film the scene, a stern warning to everyone within sight, and a good talking-to for Heinrich.
“The way you ran off like that made us suspect you were guilty of something,” one of the police told him in heavily accented English.
“Only guilty of being in a hurry. Can I use one of the computers?”
The cop nodded. Heinrich gave the Chinese guy more money than he needed to and opened up a Skype conversation with Charles Montaine’s office.
A secretary tried to fob him off but Heinrich was having none of it. He told her he had cracked the case. The murderer was now in the hands of the police, as were most of the gang members. After a few minutes, he got through. Thalia sat beside him.
Charles Montaine’s smug, wealthy face appeared on the screen.
“Congratulations on another success story, Mr. Muller. I must say, you did remarkably well.”
Montaine stopped. A look of concern crossed his face. Heinrich was not convinced.
“Are you all right, Mr. Muller?”
“No. I got my ass kicked on numerous occasions in the past week. Par for the fucking course. Do I have the job?”
“If you require medical attention, of course any of that would be covered—”
“Do I have the fucking job?”
Montaine spread out his hands in a welcoming gesture. “Of course you do! I had decided to hire you even before this case, but I knew you’d be helpful on this. The extra motivation would help you solve it more quickly.”
Heinrich almost punched the screen. This son of a bitch had been planning to hire him anyway? All this had been unnecessary? He could be searching for Jan right now!
It was a titanic effort to control himself. Only the knowledge that if he blew up now he might lose everything kept him from saying what he really wanted to say.
“Can I be based in Warsaw?”
“Yes. I made that clear.”
/> “When can I start?”
“As soon as you’d like. I’m sure there are some matters back in New York you must attend to.”
“I’ll deal with those later. Get me on the next flight to Warsaw.”
“Is something the matter?”
“None of your goddam business.”
Montaine inclined his head. “I see that you are in a hurry, Mr. Muller. I’ll have my personal assistant get you a flight. She’ll also send you the paperwork so that you can become part of the Executive International Security Corporation family ... and we do consider ourselves a family.”
You don’t know shit about family, bozo.
OK, neither do I, but I’m going to learn.
Montaine was good to his word and got Heinrich on a flight to Warsaw via Paris. It was a roundabout way to get there, but it was the only way to get there by that evening. Good enough.
As Heinrich packed, he heard a knock on his hotel room door. It was Thalia.
“It’s too bad I couldn’t show you any of Greece,” she said. “I understand why you’re going, though.”
“Yeah, there’s still no sign of him. It’s chewing at my gut.”
“You’ll find him. It seems that’s your specialty.”
“That and getting my ass kicked,” Heinrich said, shaking his head and packing the rest of his gear. “So what are you going to do?”
“Stay in Athens for a little while, clearing things up. Thanks to you, it’s almost all done. There’s going to be a memorial service for Professor Christodolou at the university.”
“I’m sorry I’ll miss that,” Heinrich said, and meant it. Reluctantly he added, “Say thanks to Adonis for me.”
A smile crept onto her pretty face. “I will.”
“You and him an item now?” he couldn’t help asking.
She giggled. “No, that was just a fling.”
So he gets a fling and I get a thank you? Just my luck.
He faced her. “I need to get to the airport.”
She gave him a peck on the cheek. “You’re a good man, Heinrich. Good luck to you.”
And she was gone.
On the plane, to keep his thoughts away from horrible images of what might happen to Jan on the streets, Heinrich tried to focus on the employment contract Montaine had offered. It gave him everything Montaine had promised—a tidy salary, expenses, excellent medical and dental, danger pay, relocation allowance, and lots of extras.
What it didn’t give him was freedom. That was all right, though; his freedom hadn’t given him much happiness.
He landed in Warsaw at 10 p.m. A quick call to the halfway house confirmed that Jan had not reappeared. Heinrich was in a hotel by 11:30 and out on the streets by 11:45.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Heinrich wandered, having no idea where to go. He started with the bus and train stations, where a lot of the homeless hung out. From there, he moved to the seedier parts of town. Having been a young thug himself, he could sniff out those kinds of neighborhoods like a bloodhound.
It didn’t take long to leave behind Warsaw’s restored historic center and move into the rougher areas. Medieval walls and nineteenth-century homes gave way to cheap bars and Soviet apartment blocks. Everything was grim slabs of concrete, the colors muted, the people somber.
This late at night, no children were out except for roving gangs of teens. Many of them were obviously drunk or high. Heinrich scanned their faces, looking for Jan.
At the Internet cafe in Sparti, he had printed a photo of Jan. He now showed it to anyone he thought might help—shopkeepers and street vendors, punk teens and prostitutes. All shook their heads. He kept going.
By two in the morning the streets had mostly cleared out. Only the streetwalkers and the drunks remained. Shifty men, alone or in small groups, moved quietly through the darkened streets on business he’d rather not know about.
This was no place for a teenage kid to be out alone, but Jan didn’t have any other option. Heinrich had called the halfway house every hour and they still had no word. After a while, the night monitor, sounding annoyed, told him they’d notify him the moment they heard anything. Heinrich resisted the urge to call again and instead walked the streets alone, showing the picture to everyone he passed. All he got was shaking heads and the occasional suspicious look.
He searched until sunup, shining a flashlight in the faces of the sleeping homeless, exploring the dark recesses under bridges and at the ends of trash-strewn alleys. Twice he interrupted hookers with their johns. At one point, he came across a skeletal junkie shooting up heroin. However, he found no sign of Jan.
As the sun rose, Heinrich staggered into a cafe and ordered coffee and breakfast. He ate his meal without tasting it or even seeing it. His mind had become blank, focused on only one purpose, and yet having no idea how to achieve it. How was he to find one boy hiding in a city of three million people?
He felt so tired. All the stress of the fights and the sleepless nights in Greece had caught up to him. His arm throbbed; his bruises were sore. His lids lowered and he crossed his less injured arm on the chipped table, resting his head on it.
Some time later, a tap on his shoulder woke him up.
The cafe owner, a soft-bellied middle-aged man with a tired, drooping face, stood above him. “You can’t sleep here,” he said in a weary but firm tone, as if he had to say this to people every morning.
Heinrich held up the photo. “Have you seen this boy?”
The man’s expression softened. “No. I’m sorry.”
The man poured him another cup of coffee.
“It’s on the house,” he said as he walked away.
Heinrich finished the last of his breakfast, gulped down the coffee, and headed out.
All that day, he wandered, checking every abandoned building, every park. Whenever he came across street kids—and there were many, huddled in doorways, sniffing glue, and sharing bottles of cheap booze in parks—he showed them the picture of Jan. He got no leads. He did get a few threats and even a proposition. A girl with a lip piercing, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, called him a faggot and offered to “straighten him out” for ten bucks. Shaking his head, he kept going.
So many. All these idle kids. Many weren’t exactly homeless. They had places to live; they just didn’t have homes. He had been one of them, way back in the New York of the Eighties. Out all night, coming back when he felt like it, leaving when he felt like it, skipping school, nobody caring.
During his all-night walk, Heinrich hadn’t seen any afterhours activities for these kids. No youth clubs, no midnight basketball. When he was growing up, midnight basketball had been big. Sure, there had been fights and the kids sometimes smoked weed while watching the games, but the bright lights and crowds of the courts had kept away the predators and attracted kids who might otherwise have been caught in the city’s darker shadows.
Morning turned to noon, and noon into afternoon. Still no luck. Heinrich knew he should get some sleep back at the hotel before the long night to come, but he couldn’t bring himself to break off the search. He downed an energy drink, ate a quick meal, and kept going.
When night fell, exhaustion began weighing him down. The darkness told his body it was time to sleep, and it was all his mind could do to tell it otherwise. Heinrich found a park with a large fountain at its center. It was broken and dry, and teens clustered around it, flirting and roughhousing. The smell of weed wafted through the air. A few of the kids gave Heinrich wary looks but most ignored him, confident in their numbers.
Heinrich walked around the circular fountain, holding out the picture of Jan, asking if anyone had seen him. Nobody had.
Utterly spent, Heinrich sat down heavily on the lip of the fountain. Perhaps he should just wait there and see if the kid passed through. Where the hell could he be? If Jan was inside somewhere, in a squat or some predator’s house, Heinrich would never spot him. Even if he was wandering the streets like Heinrich, there was no guarantee of co
ming across him in a city this large. They could be missing each other by one measly city block and never know it.
Heinrich’s feet throbbed. He wondered how many miles he’d walked, and how many more he’d have to walk. Checking his phone for the hundredth time that day, he saw that the halfway house still hadn’t sent any word.
With a groan of frustration, he struggled to his feet and started wandering again.
Heinrich didn’t even try to create a search pattern. Before, he had been systematically going through each of the nasty neighborhoods and checking the bus and train stations with extra care. Now he just walked. And walked.
Hours later, sometime in the middle of his second night when he had lost all track of time, he passed through an ugly little park of concrete and a few withered trees. There, sitting on a concrete bench amid a cluster of teenaged boys passing a plastic bag among themselves, he spotted a familiar figure.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Jan!”
Heinrich ran up to the kids, who backed off in sudden fear at being charged by a wild-eyed muscleman with two bandaged arms.
“Get away from us!” one shouted. Another gripped the neck of a beer bottle, ready to use it as a weapon. Heinrich ignored them. Jan hadn’t moved. He was rooted in place, staring in disbelief at the sudden apparition out of the shadows.
Jan had a fresh black eye and held a plastic bag that stank of glue. It took a moment for his eyes to focus and register what he was seeing.
“Heinrich? What are you doing here?” Jan asked.
Heinrich gripped him by the shoulders. “I came to find you. What happened? Are you all right?”
The teen with the beer bottle strutted up to him. “Get out of here, sicko. We don’t want your kind around here.”
“Beat it,” Heinrich said, barely sparing him a glance. “I’m his … foster father.”
“Yeah, well, you must suck at it if he’d rather live out here.”
Heinrich tried to ignore the sting those words carried.
“Come on, Jan. Let’s go,” Heinrich said.