by A. M. Murray
“Good evening, Mr. Slade,” he said with a dour expression, in contrast to his beaming welcome earlier in the day and the charismatic lilt of his Caribbean accent. “A call to the cab company told me I might find you here. I see you are enjoying our famous Road Town hospitality.”
“I am indeed. If all your hotels are this charming, I would say Road Town offers unrivaled hospitality.”
Penn nodded. “Did you visit the office of Mr. Woodcock earlier today?”
“Yes. I did.”
“Did he give you the information you required?”
“Unfortunately not. He said his hands are tied by non-disclosure agreements with his clients. It’s entirely understandable.”
“I am pleased to hear that you did not press him to oblige your request,” Penn said.
Slade felt sure that Penn and Woodcock talked after his visit and the Detective-Inspector already knew the answer to his question.
“Did you visit his office again this evening at around nine-thirty?” Penn asked.
“No. Mr. Woodcock and I left his office together before six. He was in a hurry to leave. I believe he has a social engagement this evening.”
“Ah, that would be Road Town’s charity ball to raise funds for our local breast cancer awareness campaign. He is the chairman of that particular activity. His first wife sadly passed away from the disease. Mr. Woodcock is a patron of many of Road Town’s benevolent causes,” Penn added, his respect for the man palpable.
“I came to Road Town to identify the body of Chloe Harris. Information from Mr. Woodcock would merely have been an added bonus. He is a distinguished gentleman, and I did not press the issue.” Slade stretched his legs out under the table, giving the impression of a relaxed visitor, work schedule completed, and now savoring his last few hours in paradise.
“After I left his office, I checked into this hotel, took a nap, and came down here to eat, drink, and relax. I’m still jet-lagged after traveling across the globe this past week.”
“You may be interested to know that a person, whose identity currently remains unknown, forcibly entered the office of BFI Management this evening. We estimate the time of entry to have been nine-thirty. He destroyed the computer and printer and set the building alight. All that remains is a pile of embers. Do you know anything about that?”
Slade’s head jerked back, his eyes wide and mouth gaping.
“No. I do not.”
“The intruder appears to have used a rifle to shoot out the lock, an extreme yet effective method. We found the weapon on the street.”
Slade was thankful he’d worn gloves when disposing of the rifle. Otherwise, he’d be Penn’s number one suspect if the local forensics team lifted his prints.
“Surely you don’t think I’m the intruder. I work for the FBI, for the US government.”
“It is precisely because you work for the FBI that I am here asking questions,” Penn said, his face a stone mask.
Slade ignored the remark. “Perhaps the person who hired the killer to eliminate Chloe Harris also instructed him to destroy evidence connected with her and the genuine Palmer couple’s fortune. It might be worth checking the rifle butt for skin and blood traces from the victim in your morgue. It could link the two crimes.”
“You may be right, and we will follow up in due course. The remains of Mr. Woodcock’s filing cabinets suggest that the perpetrator opened them deliberately, allowing the fire to destroy every file. But in your line of work, I am sure you understand we must investigate all possible connections, and you, Mr. Slade, are one, even though you are employed by your government, as you say. I assume you will leave our territory tomorrow.”
“Yes. I will take an early flight to Washington.”
“May I bid you goodnight and hope you enjoy what is left of your short stay in our town. I recommend you sample the Painkiller, a cocktail that’s rather famous in these parts.” Penn paused to look at his watch. “I now have the unpleasant task of disturbing Mr. Woodcock at his gala event to inform him about the sad state of his office.”
He pulled his cap out from under his arm and with the flicker of a smile left the hotel.
Slade ordered another drink and started to relax.
By the time he’d finished his sixth whiskey, he was light-headed, but still in charge of his faculties. He ordered a Painkiller and could see why the blend of orange and pineapple juices with cream of coconut, island rum, and nutmeg was popular. He would have liked another but was at the point of losing control.
Slade returned to his room and retrieved the Palmer file from under the mattress. An hour passed while he read through the papers. The memory of the harrowing antics involved in extracting them from the office blurred into insignificance when he absorbed the information they provided. He took notes, photographed the pages, and booted up his computer to send them with a sitrep to Deacon.
His plan to fly back to Washington, DC aborted, Slade booked a seat on a morning flight with connecting flights to Dubrovnik, Croatia. He requested a wake-up call for four o’clock, in time for the first departure of the day from Road Town’s ferry terminal via the direct route to St. Thomas, where he would board the plane.
He called Roche, still in France, and asked him to put on his gray hat and follow the recent money trail from Palmer’s account, now closed, at Palmer Consulting’s local bank in Road Town. He recommended following the money through several Palmer Consulting accounts, starting from the BVI branch of Fealty Global Private Banking Ltd. and through the bank’s Seychelles and Samoan branches to a Croatian bank in Dubrovnik, where it was deposited in an account under the name of Nile Investments (Croatia) Ltd. He also asked Roche to trace any bank activity after the funds had reached the Croatian account.
Slade gave Roche the ID and password he’d found in Woodcock’s file, and with luck, they’d work with all the accounts.
He called Isa again, but her phone did not respond. Five minutes later, he was in bed, thinking it was an evening in Road Town well spent.
CHAPTER 47
(Tuesday Night— Road Town, BVI)
While Slade had lain unconscious on the floor of BVI Management, Andrija Novak stood under the tree and watched the fire take hold of the motorbike sales office and work its way up to the higher floors. Satisfied that no one could escape it, he sprinted to a stolen bike stashed behind a clump of bushes two blocks away.
A light sink of intermeshing foliage, spread like a canopy between the treetops on both sides of the street, swallowed shots of moonlight whenever they broke through the clouds. Using the swath of darkness and skills learned years ago in night combat as a member of the Serbian insurgency in Croatia, the man was invisible.
He gunned the engine into life, spraying gravel with the rear wheel, and traveled at high speed to the local airport on Beef Island. He left the bike in the car park and hurried to the terminal’s business aviation area, where he went through immigration procedures on a fake passport without problems. He boarded a waiting Gulfstream jet chartered by his employer, an American calling himself Nile Thanos, though Novak doubted it was his real name. The aircraft refueled and stood ready to leave after arriving two hours earlier to transport him from the island.
He slugged down a glass of champagne served by the cabin attendant, a voluptuous young woman who might have aroused his animal instincts if he’d been less tense. The plane taxied to the runway, but he knew he’d only unwind when they were airborne and away from BVI airspace. He was the sole passenger, and the cabin attendant had withdrawn to the improbable solace of the galley.
Novak reflected on his evening’s work with satisfaction. He’d executed the two tasks he’d been instructed to carry out by his billionaire boss. As an unexpected bonus, he’d eliminated a nuisance sniffing around BVI Management’s office. When Novak arrived at the building, he’d been nonplussed to see a man who looked like a professional investigator and might compromise his employer’s plan. But when he thought of a kill, his concern had quickly
transformed to excitement.
He never worked on a job without a weapon, and this time, his resourcefulness had gotten him a single-shot hunting rifle with a scope, perfect for bashing the back of a skull and firing at a target from a distance. Although the shot had missed, his backup plan had succeeded. The boss would be elated by his report of eliminating a potential threat, and Novak hoped it would provide the leverage he wanted.
Tonight’s successful destruction of Woodcock’s records and termination of the ice-cold blonde bitch who’d got her comeuppance for her arrogance toward him was already an achievement. Adding the fiery death of the snooping investigator made him a shoo-in for head of security at his employer’s luxury island compound, a plum job for a man with his finely honed skills. He’d lived up to his name—Andrija, the warrior—and felt sure his father, killed several years ago by a police bullet during an armed bank heist in Zagreb, would have been proud.
Comforted by his recollections, Novak fell into a deep sleep until the cabin attendant woke him ten minutes before landing at his destination. His mental and physical exhaustion always peaked after a job involving a kill, and he welcomed the renewed vitality surging through his body, a gift of the long sleep.
But staring down the cabin attendant’s cleavage, he regretted the lost opportunity for sex with a big-breasted young woman, especially one who did not seem to return his lust. For Novak, the challenge of rape heightened the gratification of sex more than one hundredfold, and he’d acquired an addiction to it during his years of insurgent activities. He’d been dying to take her, but the timing was wrong. The girl was in luck, and the stresses of his past few days of high-tension work remained unrelieved.
When he stepped outside the terminal building at Dubrovnik Airport, Novak waved at one of his new colleagues, Vlado Tomic, waiting with a car. It was just after midday, but daytime temperatures had plunged during his short time away. His clothing, suitable for the Caribbean climate, offered little protection from the uncomfortable cold gusts of the northeastern Bura wind blowing into the city from the mountains, chopping the tops off waves out at sea on this bleak Croatian afternoon. He hurried into the car’s comforting warmth.
Tomic complained of exhaustion from the exertion of fitting out the security section of their employer’s compound for two days straight with no time off to sleep. The boss insisted that his men carry out the work, to avoid external contractors who might talk about the weapons stash and arouse unwelcome interest from the local authorities.
Despite Tomic’s tough image—a shaved head complemented by a formidable array of neck and facial tattoos—his colleagues nicknamed him the babbler because he bragged about his exploits at every opportunity. Novak was not a religious person, but he thanked God today for Tomic’s uncharacteristic silence during the drive from the airport.
Tomic took them to the coastal city’s marina where they boarded a souped-up motor launch to ferry them to the compound located in a former castle on a remote coastal island. They sat back in the launch, legs stretched out, for the two-hour trip.
Uninhabited for the last one hundred and fifty years, the island met the American’s unique needs. Novak knew he’d used hefty bribes to persuade a local government official to grant a thirty-year, sole-residential lease of the entire island with an option to extend for a further ten years.
He’d also invested several million dollars over the past six months in renovations to transform the derelict castle into a luxury residence with servants’ quarters and a new wing containing state-of-the-art surveillance equipment linked to cameras at strategic sites throughout the island. The monitoring setup was not yet operational, but the security team expected to finish installing it within the next few days. This wing also contained a well-stocked weapons room, thanks to the efforts of Tomic and his colleagues, and accommodation for the security team of six mature-age mercenaries of Serbo-Croatian origin. Novak hand-picked the other five, and they’d quickly become a close group of former comrades in arms.
Their employer had purchased a five-hundred-foot mega yacht replete with a forty-foot tender housed within the forward part of the superstructure. The vessel had arrived three weeks ago and remained berthed alongside a deep-water quay constructed to accommodate it. With luxury features, including a deck pool, helicopter landing pad, movie theater, gym, and fifteen spacious cabins sleeping thirty people, plus crew quarters, the yacht was one of the most opulent vessels afloat. The captain and crew, employed as local hires, lived between voyages in a separate building erected opposite the quay.
Before Novak had left for the BVI, he and Tomic had speculated over drinks about why the American selected Croatia as his base. Tomic put it down to the coastal island’s seclusion, but Novak knew better. In his view, the main reason was a ready supply of former soldiers who’d fought for Serbia in Croatia’s Serbian insurgency and kept their ruthless fighting skills in prime condition, since the end of Croatia’s independence hostilities in 1995, by working as mercenaries wherever opportunity took them. With promises of higher pay and a better living environment, Novak had persuaded several to return from Africa to join the security team.
Novak believed the American had amassed his fortune through illegal activities and needed a safe haven with influential local government officials on his payroll. Several had visited the island already and been treated like VIPs. Since the US still did not have an extradition agreement with Croatia, his island compound would serve as a secluded, secure base for a few years, in case the US government tried to drag him back to face a trial and incarceration. Novak respected Thanos for his strategic planning and ruthlessness.
As their launch approached the island, Tomic told Novak that the boss had taken off in his new toy across the Adriatic to Italy right after he got back from the BVI. The rumor among the staff was that he’d gone to pick up a friend who would stay in the compound with him for a while.
Novak felt his pulse rate rise with the news of a stranger soon to enter the select group of vetted people allowed to set foot on the island.
CHAPTER 48
(Thursday Morning—Dubrovnik)
Slade stood outside the terminal building of Dubrovnik airport exactly where Novak and Tomic had met twelve hours earlier. It was a few minutes past midnight.
He took a twenty-five-minute cab ride into the city and checked into the Pucic Palace Hotel, a seventeenth-century Baroque building located on limestone-paved Gundulić Square in the heart of Dubrovnik Old Town. The original town stood inside fortification walls built a thousand years before the hotel in the seventh century to protect coastal residents from the onslaught of barbarian invaders.
Slade felt a sense of safety and peace in this historic enclave, at least until tomorrow morning, when Deacon and three colleagues would arrive from Washington, DC on FBI wings and meet him at eleven. The FBI had called in an outstanding favor from Croatia’s Security and Intelligence Agency and arranged for expedited clearance through immigration procedures, and Slade expected them to be armed.
Despite the late hour, he picked up maps of the area, including the outlying islands, from the night-duty concierge and asked him to charter a medium-sized cruiser for a tour of the islands tomorrow afternoon.
“We’ll be looking for an American who’s living on one of the islands. Have you heard anything?” Slade asked.
“My cousin, Dragan, works for an American called Nile Thanos, who moved into a castle on one of the outer islands. Dragan joined a construction team that built a desalination plant on the island. Now he’s a crew member on the man’s superyacht.”
Woodcock had transferred Palmer’s money to an account in Dubrovnik, Croatia under the name of Nile Investments. Slade did not believe in coincidence.
“Which island?” he asked. Slade believed Dragan’s employer would turn out to be Ashton. Never rely on luck, but if it’s on offer, grab it with both hands.
“The island is called Bubreg because of its shape. You can see it here on the map.” The co
ncierge, a distinctive-looking, hawk-nosed man in his mid-twenties, pointed to a kidney-shaped island located approximately one hundred twenty miles from the coast.
“It’ll take you about two hours from this marina a couple of minutes down the road from here. It’s where you’ll board your rental cruiser tomorrow.”
He drew a line to mark the short route from the hotel to the local marina and continued the line across the Adriatic Sea to Bubreg Island, his pencil weaving between some of the 1,185 islands off the coast of Croatia.
“But they don’t like visitors over there,” he said. “The man’s employees turn away curious locals, and they’re rough. Ex-military Croatian Serbs. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of an argument with those guys.”
After the concierge pointed out the main attractions of the old city, Slade went to his room and, before settling in for the night, called Isa. He’d almost given up when she answered on the seventh ring.
“I’ve been trying to catch you. Are you back in Japan?” Slade asked.
“Yes.” Isa sounded half-asleep, and Slade guessed he’d disturbed a jet-lag-induced afternoon nap.
“Did you arrive in Tokyo this morning?”
“Yes, again.”
“I’m back in Europe tying up loose ends and will return to Tokyo via Washington, DC in a few days,” Slade said a little too fast, overcompensating for the lack of enthusiasm at the other end. “Alex will be back in Tokyo before me, so contact him if you need anything.”
“I will. I need to rest, so let’s talk again soon.”
“Okay. I miss you.” Slade was disconcerted by her lukewarm reception but attributed it to jet lag after a long flight across the globe from London to Japan. Given the electricity between them, he knew their relationship would heat up again in Tokyo.