by Dana Haynes
“Who gathered them?” Basha asked.
“Corporal Llumnica,” the sergeant said, shaking his head sadly.
The four Iraqis stared at the soldiers, uncomprehending. One of the men asked a question in Arabic. Neither Basha nor his sergeant spoke the language.
“Llumnica is no genius.”
The sergeant smiled. “No, sir.”
“So the concept of pedophilia …”
“He’s not a bad soldier,” the sergeant said. “He’s an idiot. But he’s not a bad soldier.”
A second male refugee seemed to ask them a question. The air was hot and decidedly unhealthy in the hut, so Basha and his sergeant stepped back outside into the sunshine. The sergeant relocked the metal door.
“They’re no good for the traffickers,” Basha said. “There’s a factory outside Bratislava that will take them as workers. Ship them to this man.” He paused, pulled an old parking ticket out of his wallet, and dashed a name and address, for a commercial site on the west side of the Italy-Slovenia border, north of Trieste. “He’ll keep them until the Slovak warehouse can be contacted. They won’t net us what the bordellos do—not a tenth as much. But that’s no reason to be wasteful.”
“Very good, sir.”
Basha walked to his car and climbed in.
“Sergeant? Get them some water,” he said. “A dead refugee is worth fuck-all on the open market.”
“Right away, sir.”
Basha got back onto the highway, but it was barely a twenty-minute drive into Belgrade proper. He turned off onto the street that led to the Parliament building, Kneza Miloša. Just past the grand opulence of the Church of St. Sava, he spotted the almost-finished high-rise office building. A KSF soldier stood guard outside and called in to have the garage door opened. Basha pulled onto the darkened ramp and swept swiftly downward into the underground parking. His car, and his partner’s fleet, were the only vehicles in the vast, echoing space designed for several hundred cars. Lazar’s fleet included an armored Escalade, a glistening silver Jaguar, several high-end American motorbikes that the kid couldn’t ride, and a beastly metallic Hummer that dwarfed the others, including the Cadillac.
Basha took the stairs to the lobby and walked up to the unfinished concierge’s desk, where another guard stood on detail. “Major.”
Basha scanned the lobby. The acoustic tiles had not yet been installed and wires hung in lazy loops from the spaces above, in between the air ducts. Rolls of industrial carpet were stacked in one corner. “Did he get in last night?”
The guard said, “He’s in, sir,” in a tone that conveyed his annoyance.
“Alone?”
“He’s with one of his whores, sir.”
Basha stared at the soldier, who stood at attention and took the look without comment.
“Sergeant, no one is supposed to …” Basha’s voice trailed away. He ran a calloused hand through his iron-gray hair. “God, it’s like babysitting a child. All right. Send me up.”
The sergeant used his walkie-talkie to call upstairs to the penthouse suite—the only floor currently functioning in the high-rise owned, via several cutout corporations, by Ragusa Logistics. Once tenants began moving in, the elevators would be functional on every floor. For now, they were controlled from the penthouse only, and one of Basha’s Kosovar troops manned the station at all times.
Basha turned and marched toward the elevator bank.
Lazar Aleksić had just done a line of coke as Major Driton Basha stepped out of the elevator. Lazar grinned at the taller man, then nodded toward the mirror and the razor on the coffee table before him.
“No, thank you,” Basha said.
Lazar slouched back on the butterscotch-colored leather couch. He wore black dress trousers but was barefoot and shirtless. His straw-blond hair stood up on end, complementing the pillow creases on his otherwise smooth cheek. He had a surfer’s lean physique and easy smile.
“You should have seen the ho spinning at the Obsidian last night. She was off the chain!”
Basha nodded, understanding none of it.
“You sure you don’t want some?” Lazar nudged the coffee table with the sole of one bare foot. “Plenty.”
“No. I heard from my unit at the Macedonian border. We—”
Lazar nodded toward the master suite. “There’s a girl in there. Best you ever had. She’s asleep, but she won’t mind if you wanna throw a quick fuck into her.”
Basha stood silently. He wanted to pinch the boy’s head off his shoulders, but, then again, he always wanted to do that. If Lazar Aleksić wasn’t the key to all their profits, he might have.
“I heard from my unit on the Macedonian border,” he said. “We are expecting a shipment.”
Lazar yawned and scratched his bare chest. “How many?”
“How many do you have buyers for?”
“I could place six girls. Right now.” He snapped his fingers to show how easy it would be. “Boys are tougher. Two … No, I could place four.”
Basha nodded. “Six girls, four boys. You have buyers for them lined up?”
Lazar’s eyes glazed over. He said, “I want a McMuffin.”
“I’ll have one of the men go—”
“Actually, I want to go to Berlin. Jay-Z is playing there. I love Jay-Z. I want to go tonight.”
“Impossible,” the major replied softly.
“Bullshit. I’m rich. I can do whatever I want. Bring bodyguards. Bring as many as you want. Come yourself. You like Jay-Z?”
Basha shook his head. “You have too many enemies. Your family has too many enemies. I can’t protect you outside of Belgrade.”
“Well, I’m going, so figure it out.”
Basha took a deep breath. “How quickly can you get confirmation from your buyers?”
A petulant cloud formed over the youth’s fair features. He started to respond as the door to the master suite opened. A girl padded out. She had very large hair and very large breasts, and she wore one of Lazar’s T-shirts but nothing else.
She crossed the living room and leaned over the back of the butterscotch couch. Lazar turned toward her and they kissed passionately. Bent at the waist, the T-shirt slipped up over her ass.
They separated. Lazar squeezed one breast. “Go say hi to Driton. He’s my friend.”
Giggling, she circled the couch and sidled up to the soldier. “God, you’re tall! Driton? What kind of name—”
Basha spun the girl around to face Lazar. He drew a narrow, steel dagger from a shoulder-strapped sheath—it looked more like an ice pick than a combat knife—and drove it into her chest, just under her lowest rib and angled up to pierce her heart. The tough, thin blade met no resistance. Slicing through cheese would have been harder.
He withdrew the slim blade. Blood began to spread on her shirt. She opened her mouth wide, eyes wide, and her muscles went statue-rigid. No sound escaped.
“Jesus!” Lazar tried scrambling over the back of the couch to get distance from the nightmarish sight.
Basha held the girl. The red blossom grew on her abdomen. But not really that much. She made an inhaling sound through her open mouth, and her eyes rolled back up into her skull. He released his hold on her, and she fell straight down.
The stain on her T-shirt grew a little. Basha knew how to make sure the blood from her heart leaked into her chest cavity, for the most part. There are times when one wants blood gushing, to send a message. And times when one wishes to avoid a mess.
“Fuck!” Lazar screeched. He pointed. “What did—”
“I would have preferred she not hear my name or see my face,” Basha said. He nudged the girl’s rump with the toe of his boot. She rolled at the hip, forward an inch, then rolled right back. Inert. “Six girls, four boys. And I assume your buyers would prefer them to be well under the age of sixteen, if possible?”
/> “Yes!” Lazar bellowed, his hands shaking. “Jesus fuck! Yes! Yes, I … Yes on the girls! I … maybe four boys, I think …”
“You said four. Four boys.”
“I can move them! I can move them!”
Basha nodded. “Good. I’ll call my unit.”
Lazar sprinted for the kitchen, and, a second later, Basha heard him puke in the sink.
Basha sighed and drew his Nextel phone, activating the walkie-talkie feature. “We have a mess to clean up and a body. Over.”
“Copy, Major.”
“And contact Lieutenant Krasniqi in Elez Han. Tell him six girls, four boys.”
“Sir.”
Basha returned his phone to his pocket. He knelt and wiped the long, thin pick on the girl’s T-shirt. He checked his own sleeves and hands; no splatter. Still crouched over the body, he spoke up. “We’ll have the product ready by the end of the week.”
“I understand!” The voice from the kitchen was choked with vomit and emotion.
“Good.” Basha rose to his full height, returned the stiletto to its shoulder sheath. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”
At the elevator, he turned and shouted. “My regards to your family.”
He heard Lazar Aleksić puke again.
C16
Varenna, Italy
Gunther Kessler had committed many, many crimes during his time at the Zurich branch of Banque du Monte Rosa. So many, in fact, that the bank faced a dilemma.
Commit one banking crime and you’ll get fired.
Commit a handful and you’ll go to prison.
But commit scores of them—if not hundreds—all in the name of a centuries-old financial establishment, and they have no option but to take the most dramatic response.
Promote you. And then hide you.
Banque du Monte Rosa of Zurich needed a nice, quiet place to store Gunther Kessler, where no international tribunal would look for him. They opted for the quaint lakeside village of Varenna, on Lago de Como in Northwest Italy, within sight of Swiss mountains. Other than the daily inflow of tourists, via ferry from Como or by train, no businessmen ever ventured to Varenna. It seemed the perfect depot to hide a man whose deplorable acts had netted you millions upon millions in profit.
Gunther Kessler remained on the books as a low-level bank employee. He was free to maintain the various illegal projects he’d created for the bank, and to seek out other clients.
One of those clients was St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking.
And, like his other private clientele, the partners of St. Nicholas referred to him simply as Ways & Means.
Michael Finnigan flew back to Milan, commercial, and caught the train from Malpensa directly to Lake Como, coming up on the eastern side of the idyllic mountain lake. He arrived a little past noon. With only a messenger bag, Finnigan hopped off the train first and rolled on downhill, into the narrow, shore-hugging community. He walked with the bandy-legged gait of his father and his uncles, as if walking the beat was in the family DNA. He tried to imagine his sister, Nicole, walking a beat, but failed.
He looked scruffy enough that none of the hucksters offered him maps or kites or tchotchkes.
He’d called ahead and thus found Gunther at his usual table in a small teashop, looking dejected. The banker was small and tubby, bald and badly nearsighted. He wore shabby suits and bought inexpensive eyeglasses online to save money. Finnigan knew from past visits that the man would sit in the shop for hours, reusing the same teabag until it was reduced to little more than a mesh net and pencil shavings. No one passing by would suspect that Ways & Means was a criminal mastermind whose personal net worth was in the tens of millions.
The lake looked placid today and one of three ferries making the rounds—like an aquatic crosstown bus—pulled into the dock, the crew shouting “Vaaah … rennn … aaahhh …” as if it were three words. There was little to do in Varenna, so nobody was in a hurry to get to it. Those tourists not sauntering the Candy Land–like trail along the curvy shore sat on benches and read, or knelt to line up photographs.
Finnigan entered, the bell over the door tinkling, and sat on the far side of the heart-shaped table, on the uncomfortable metal chair with the heart-shaped back. Ways & Means bobbed an aging teabag in a cup of lightly browned water and peered through his thick lenses at the young man.
Finnigan reached into his messenger bag, looked around to make sure they were undetected, and pulled out a stained paper bag. Inside lay three glazed Krispy Kremes, FedExed from a shop in Secaucus, New Jersey, where his niece worked.
Ways & Means peered into the bag and sighed. “These will probably kill me.”
“Probably. How you doing?”
The egg-shaped man shrugged. “It could be worse. I’m not sure how, but …”
The shop owner came and Finnigan asked for a cappuccino. He looked out the window at the slow-footed tourists, several of whom sat under umbrellas, wine glasses in hand. You could physically see people unwind in a town like this, as if a vise grip was being loosened somewhere on their spines.
“You’re doing okay?” Finnigan knew to ask again about the man’s health. It was expected of him.
“I am in exile, serving my sentence with nothing but … this.” Ways & Means gestured at the window and the paradise beyond.
“Yeah, that’s … tough.”
“Last month, I had a scheme to hide some elected officials’ money in a little-known firm in Iceland. A nice little mineral exploratory company. Nothing fancy. I thought they might make three, maybe three-point-two percent interest. Who knows? Could’ve done better.” Ways & Means broke off a bit of doughnut and gobbled it down. It might have tasted like paper, for all his facial features showed. “Do you know what happened? The idiots in Iceland discovered chromium. Chromium! My elected officials made three hundred and forty percent interest in a month. Now they’re rich and I have to find another obscure company to launder their new profits. I ask you: Is that fair?”
Finnigan never knew whether the small, fat man was joking. Every time they met, he had another hideous tale of ludicrous good luck. “Sisyphus’s got nothing on you, man.”
He grunted around another mouthful of doughnut. Sitting, as he did, a couple feet from a display case of the finest pastries in all of the Italian lake region. “Sisyphus tried to roll a stone uphill. I do that while passing a stone. But what of St. Nicholas? How is Katalin?”
“She’s good.”
“I’m in love with her. You know this?”
“Most everyone is.”
“What can I do for you?”
Finnigan glanced around the shop to make sure they had some privacy. He leaned forward across the painted pink-and-white table. “How do I go about buying underage sex slaves from Syria, here in Europe?”
“What price range are you thinking?”
Finnigan sat back. “Really?”
The other man blinked through thick glasses.
“That’s your question? I ask about underage sex slaves and you ask about my price range?”
The fat man shrugged. “I should have started with gender?”
“You’re the most morally hollow human being I’ve ever met.”
Ways & Means shook his head, his jowls quivering. “No, no. You’re too kind. There are many less moral men than myself. Some come by it quite naturally. I do what I can, but—”
“There’s something very wrong with you.”
“I am not a fool, Michael. You and the delightful Katalin are bounty hunters. I’m a banker. I can put two and two together.”
Finnigan shook his head. “Okay. We think the mob in Belgrade is moving refugee children on the flesh market. We think the army is involved; maybe the Serbian army, maybe Kosovo’s army. Katalin is checking that angle. I want to follow the money.”
“Wise,” the banker said, and sig
hed with fatigue. The bag in front of him was empty. “Refugees coming via Greece? Through the Balkans?”
“Yeah.”
“And ending up in European bordellos?”
“The worst kinds of bordellos. The kinds willing to barter in the slave market.”
Ways & Means sat back.
“There might be a way to find out which criminally minded bankers are moving Serbian dinars and exchanging them with euros. Or Bitcoins. If I knew that, I might be able to identify a location on the broker’s end.”
Finnigan started to smile. “Yeah. That might work.”
“I’ll look into it. Do you need any emergency capital?”
“Maybe. If we could figure out who’s brokering for the buyers, we could pose as potential customers. We’d have to wave around some green. Yeah, we might.”
The other man shrugged. “I can provide you with quite a bit of money. I’m in need of laundering some, so …”
“If we bought several slaves … I don’t know, a whole shipment, we might be in a position to demand a meeting with the seller. If we flashed some bucks …” Finnigan said, thinking out loud.
“Whatever you need.”
“Thanks, man.”
“I have no adventures of my own. And speaking of which, may I ask a question? St. Nicholas. I assume you chose the company name to connote the good feelings of Christmas?”
“Why not?” he said. “Let’s go with that theory.”
The German let out a long, morose sigh. “Kidnapping refugee children … terrible business.”
“I know, right?” He pushed back his chair and stood, reaching for his wallet. Ways & Means never paid for these meetings.
“Their profit margin would be so much higher if they’d just use narcotics on local runaways.”
“I can never tell when you’re joking.”
C17
Tel Aviv, Israel
While Finnigan went to follow the money, Fiero drove back west toward Zagreb. From there, she drove down the Dalmatian Coast to the seaside town of Rijeka, Croatia, and rendezvoused with the laconic Lachlan Sumner and their de Havilland Otter.