by Dana Haynes
Finnigan set the iPad on an inverted box of photocopier sheets—the de Havilland served as a flying office, with all the accoutrements—and activated the video player. He sat back against the fuselage, cross-legged, eyes on the screen.
It showed a France 24 video of the arrests in Amboise. The news presenter bubbled excitedly about drugs and guns and organized crime. The editors had spliced together images of flashing red-and-blue dome lights, and the pistols dusted in cocaine, and the Kosovar soldiers, handcuffed, hunched and humbled, doing the perp walk to an armored paddy wagon in the scenic old town.
The next video was an al Jazeera report on the same arrests.
Finnigan pointed to the screen, to the automatic weapons and their light dusting of narcotics, and shook his head. “Cocaine. You know that word? Cocaine? We got it from Guy Lacazette. Fucker brought a dime bag to the hit. Can you believe this guy?” He shook his head in wonder.
Finnigan hadn’t known whether the soldier spoke English but now he knew, from the way the guy’s body language reacted to that little speech.
The video switched to a Reuters report on the arrests. Finnigan reached out to lower the audio. He leaned back against the curved surface of the fuselage and ran a palm over his stubble.
Five minutes passed. The videos, on a loop, returned to France 24.
The soldier spat on the floor. “Fuck you. I tell you nothing.”
Now Fiero knew that the kid spoke English, too. She stood with Lachlan Sumner, on the far side of the aft hatch, listening via the Skype function on the iPad.
Finnigan said, “It’s simple. You guys are kidnapping little kids—Muslim kids—and selling them to perverts. You know that word? Pervert?”
The soldier lacked even a rudimentary poker face. Of course he knew the word. He’d absently moved his right hand to brace his left flank, where Fiero had hit him with the Taser the night before.
“We want this little bitch Lazar Aleksić. He’s a snot. A fucking stain on humanity. The World Court already has his number. It’s, I don’t know … a day? A week? Till they put this asshole away.”
“Go to hall, you American bastard!” The soldier tried to growl the insult, but his tone was flecked with self-pity, and not a little pain. Plus, he hadn’t peed in about a dozen hours, so that was bothering him. He sounded more defensive than angry; playing not to lose too badly, rather than playing to win.
Finnigan said, “Hell. Go to hell.”
The soldier tried spitting on the deck again.
“We do not care about the Kosovo Security Force.” Finnigan stopped, gave it a beat, then repeated it with the exact same cadence and inflections. “We do not care about the Kosovo Security Force. You’re an army. Do I look like an army? Me and Señora Falcón? We’re cops. We arrest crooks. Like Aleksić. We don’t arrest armies. What, we look stupid to you? Something about us leads you to think we’re naive? I’m, like, a babe in the woods?”
He nudged the kid, elbow to elbow. “Huh?”
Despite himself, the soldier shook his head—just a little. Likely, he was totally unaware of the gesture. But he’d entered the dialogue now.
“Armies do terrible things, but cops don’t arrest armies. It never happens. Not in the real world. Police arrest dumb shits like Lazar Aleksić. He’s who we want. You understand?”
“Go to hail.”
“Better. Short e. Listen, here’s the thing. You’ve got no ID, no money, no comms, no weapons. The French police are looking for you. I’ve given them your photo. When you get out of here, you’re going to want to get back to Kosovo. I get that. But if you don’t get arrested, can you imagine the greeting you get when you stroll in on Major Basha?”
The kid flinched at the name Basha.
“Think about what I’m saying. Help me put the dumb shit in prison, and I’ll owe you one. I can get you out of France; no muss, no fuss. Don’t help me, and you’ve gotta walk the length and width of Europe to get back to the base, from which you are absent without leave. It’ll take you weeks. I’ll still arrest the dumb shit, but now it’ll happen after you show up, outta the clear blue. What’s Major Basha gonna think about that? Hmm? Think he’ll be suspicious? Think he’ll kiss you on both cheeks and give you a promotion?”
Finnigan sat forward and set aside the iPad. He untucked the four flaps of the photocopy paper back, and reached in, withdrawing a cheap flip phone.
“Know what this is?”
The soldier frowned. “Is phone.”
“Right. This is programmed with my number, and my number only. You can reach me anytime. Help me out, I get you outta France. Free of charge.”
He slid it into the soldier’s breast pocket.
Finnigan reached into the box again.
“Know what this is?”
“Is Taser.”
“Right,” Finnigan said, then he tucked the tines under the kid’s lowest rib, and fired.
They left the unconscious soldier sprawled out on the same motel bed they’d slept in the night before. Lachlan got the de Havilland revved up, and they were airborne long before the Kosovar awoke.
C31
European Airspace
While Lachlan Sumner flew south and east toward the Adriatic, the partners sat in two of the four bolted-down club chairs, circled around a low plastic table, and ate sandwiches and bags of chips and drank wine from a pouch. A soldier and a cop, they were well-used to eating prepackaged food with plastic utensils. Finnigan took food and bottled water up to Lachlan, then returned to his own lunch.
While they ate, he made a call to old friends and arranged for 24-7 surveillance of Lazar Aleksić and the Ragusa Logistics building in Belgrade. As he hung up, Fiero wiped her lips with a paper napkin and said, “The Black Harts?”
“Who better?”
St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking could subcontract out with a detective agency, presumably, but most such agencies are required to follow very specific laws in regards to their work. The Black Harts—a nickname culled from a pub they call home—were thieves. The arrangement was simple: St. Nicholas occasionally asked the Harts to help when personnel were required, and the Harts helped themselves to stealing anything that didn’t directly interfere with the mission.
But relying on the Black Harts was similar to relying on Brodie McTavish and his mercenaries. Thieves, like mercenaries, went where the profit was. You could rent their loyalty, but you couldn’t own it.
She sipped her wine. It wasn’t terribly good and, being a Spaniard, Fiero could tell the difference. She knew Finnigan couldn’t. “This Basha. He sent men to do a job, and they failed. Spectacularly. Public arrests, the guns, the cocaine you found on Lacazette.” She licked mustard off the pad of her thumb. “He lost personnel. He lost a head-to-head matchup with an opponent. He lost face.”
“If he’s figured out who we are, and he clearly has …”
Fiero reached for the intercom on the wall and toggled it. “Lachlan?”
“Go,” the laconic Kiwi drawled from the flight deck.
“Have Bridget clear out of Kyrenia for a while. It’s possible these people know—”
“Did it last night,” the pilot interrupted. “I figured the same. She’s checked into the Semeli in Nicosia.”
“Good thinking. Thank you.” She toggled the switch off and sat back. She selected a single potato chip from Finnigan’s bag—she’d finished her own. “We have to shift focus. We need to work on Driton Basha.”
“We’re getting paid to take down Aleksić.”
“Aleksić is a posturing adolescent. It’s unlikely he’ll kill any refugees currently in the pipeline, or who were recently sold, in order to cover his tracks. I’m afraid Major Basha will.”
Finnigan poured a little more wine from the metallic sack into their plastic glasses. “The soldier kid we grabbed, he might help with that.”
�
�Possible.”
“So, how you wanna play this?”
“Throw a spanner into the works, see what happens.”
“That might endanger the victims.”
“Doing nothing might endanger the victims.”
“Is Basha expecting us to come at him?”
“Not directly, I think.” She favored her partner with a frosty smile. “He’ll assume his soldiers failed in the field. He’ll credit the outcome with their incompetence; he won’t credit us for outfighting them. And he won’t expect us to go on offense now.”
“So is that what we do? Go on offense?”
Fiero’s smile grew frostier.
C32
Kosovo Security Force Operating Base Šar
Major Driton Basha stood in his quarters with a glass of vodka in one hand and the TV remote in the other, watching Sky News, aghast.
Unbelievable.
One of his chief aides, Capt. Stevan Sorak, handcuffed and scowling at the cameras as he was led from an armored van to a prison outside Paris. Four good men with him. One man missing. The arrested men facing charges after being found with guns, and … cocaine?
Basha had a fairly good sense for which of his men were fuckups and which weren’t. The men he’d sent to France were as good as any he had. There was no possibility of the operation accidentally becoming a drug-buy-gone-wrong. No, this was a message. It was a message directed at Basha himself. The bounty hunters with the stupid company name. They were sending a very loud, very public fuck you to Driton Basha.
He drained his glass, eyes locked on the screen. If it’s a war they want …
C33
Belgrade
Lazar Aleksić had gone through stages of reaction after witnessing the murder of the girl he’d brought back from the club.
He had stood in the far corner of his penthouse living room as Kosovar soldiers brought up a body bag to dispose of the girl—who still wore Lazar’s T-shirt. She’d bled under the coffee table, but not as much as he’d expected from someone stabbed in the heart by what amounts to an ice pick.
Lazar experienced pure, unalloyed horror at the sight of the murder. He’d vomited and more. A very large part of his conscious mind focused on the cadaver—the girl he’d picked up, the girl he’d screwed—while a smaller, but important, part of his conscious mind focused on his relief that the soldiers didn’t realize he’d soiled himself.
After the horror came the slow, insane certainty that he and Major Basha would both be arrested for the murder. So very many people had seen Lazar with the girl—what the hell was her name?—the night before. They’d seen her leave with him; how could they not, her in her scarlet dress and acrylic platform shoes and improbable breasts? The witness list for the murder trial would go on for days.
The day continued and was followed by night—and so very, very much marijuana and coke and vodka and whiskey—which was followed by morning, and no police ever showed up.
Of course, the badly hungover Lazar Aleksić realized his newfound friends in the Kosovo Security Force had created a bubble of reality for him, based on the profits his enterprise was generating. They had the product, he had the buyers and the European distribution system, and together they had turned over a few million dollars in less than two years. With no end in sight. As such, he lived in a cocoon of an alternative reality, constructed and controlled by Major Basha.
And even before Basha, Lazar had purchased the controlling rights to the inspector who ran Belgrade’s Major Crimes Unit. The police kept well clear of Lazar’s business, and the top brass were well paid for that.
Lazar played the moment over and over and over and over in his mind. The girl. The look in her eye. The ice pick. The cool assuredness of Driton Basha. The slow-blooming circle of blood on that old T-shirt.
He had loved that T-shirt.
And after another day had turned into another night turned into another morning, and after shot after shot of liquor with coke with ecstasy, Lazar Aleksić had finally reached a final stage of reaction.
He wanted to try it.
He wanted to see if he could do what Basha had done. As coolly.
He told one of the Kosovar guards that he wanted a girl.
Someone who could go missing.
C34
Tours
The young Kosovar corporal—his name was Agon Llumnica—awoke in a strange hotel room.
He’d been hit three times with the Taser, and his gut ached. He rolled out of the bed and limped to the window, spotting a sunny day and a grassy slope and a curving river that he thought likely to be the same one he’d seen since arriving: the Loire.
He remembered sitting in the bakery truck listening over his headset as chaos erupted inside the cottage. He remembered calling to Captain Sorak, or to anyone on the team. Then the driver’s door had been ripped open and the tall, black-haired woman appeared, as if from out of the mist.
He remembered waking up in a storage hold, handcuffed to the floor. He could feel the floor rocking and decided that they had him on some sort of barge on the river.
The American bastard had come in and showed him the video of Captain Sorak’s team being arrested. And charged with … drug dealing?
Was that possible? Just barely.
The truth was, the major had first crossed paths with the blond party boy in Belgrade because the unit’s own drug dealings intersected with his own. The unit had been making good money on the side selling cocaine and heroin imported up through Greece, until the wars in the Middle East interrupted that supply chain. Rather than panic, Major Basha had found a new—and decidedly more profitable—merchandise to sell, and Aleksić had provided the transportation and the clients. The unit still moved a considerable amount of cocaine, but it was an enterprise with some risks. With drugs, the unit had to rely on Chinese, Thai, or—worst of all—Mexicans for their supply. With refugees, the supply walked up to the door, knocked, and asked to come in!
In this case however, no … That wasn’t what had happened here in France. Captain Sorak’s team surely would have been happy dealing a bit of drugs on the side, but if so, the entire team would have been in on it. No, the soldier told himself, this has to be a trick by that American fucker and the tall Spanish bitch.
Llumnica reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew the cheap flip phone.
This is programmed with my number. You can reach me anytime. Help me out, I get you outta France. Free of charge.
Llumnica washed up in the hotel bathroom then snuck out into the parking lot. He marched to the highway and hitched a ride with some German tourist kids to an aire de service—one of the Shell Oil–affiliated motorway service areas that dot France’s autoroutes. He waited until a lone businessman was washing his car—far from the dining crowd and the laughing children on the outdoor play set. Llumnica simply walked up to the businessman and plowed his fist into the man’s stomach. The pudgy man folded like a Swiss Army knife. He took the man’s wallet and keys and—why not?—his watch and wedding ring. Then he called headquarters.
He reported to his staff sergeant—who was in on Major Basha’s cabal—exactly what had happened. The staff sergeant told the first sergeant, who told Lt. Akil Krasniqi, who reported up the ranks to Major Basha himself.
They arranged for Corporal Agon Llumnica to get to Le Mans-Arnage Airport, where a Ryanair ticket to Belgrade awaited him.
He palmed the cheap phone throughout the flight, deep-red murderous thoughts sloshing through his brain. The American has assumed that he, Agon Llumnica, would be disloyal. That he’d be easy to flip.
He would see. He most definitely would see.
C35
Kosovo
An olive-colored truck with military stencils and a canvas roof over a metallic ribcage took nineteen of the refugee youths north toward Europe. Jane Koury, who looked like a teenager, huddled wit
h Mohamed and Amira Bakour in the back, one arm around each. A fatigue overcame Mohamed, who slept almost the entire trip. Amira held her broken right wrist tight against her torso. She made herself as small as she could and absently played with the hem of Jane’s kaffiyeh.
The humming in Jane’s ear had subsided a bit.
It felt surreal, hearing the whoosh of fresh pavement under the tires and the sound of regular traffic on the highway. No more traveling by foot on sand and dirt. From time to time, wisps of loud music slipstreamed past her, surfing a Doppler curve. If Jane closed her eyes and ignored the thrumming in her ear, she could imagine driving the M20 to Dover.
Not all of the children were from Syria. Some were very dark, and Jane guessed they had escaped sub-Saharan Africa. Before he fell asleep, Mohamed pointed to a clique of very tired children in very dirty clothes and said, simply, “Afghan.” Whether the fifteen-year-old knew or was guessing, Jane couldn’t tell.
She, too, slept part of the way, stirring as the truck veered off the highway. She felt a terrible crick in her neck and her right arm, locked tight around Amira, had fallen asleep. Without waking the girl, she used her shoulder to wipe tears off her cheek. She’d been dreaming of Tamer Awad, of his camera bag and lenses and corny jokes.
Mohamed awoke and twisted around. The canvas top of the truck was battened down to the metal sides at iron grommets. He lifted the canvas between two grommets, creating a thin, vertical slit of bright light.
“Where are we?”
The boy was quiet for a time. The tires plowed into great potholes and crawled back out. “It’s army,” the boy said. “I think.”
Amira was awake now and Jane unwound her arm from the girl’s skinny shoulders. She tried not to groan like an old lady as she got around, onto her knees, and bent low to peer through the horizontal gap that Mohamed had created by holding up the canvas.
Their truck approached a long, high fence topped with razor wire, a gatehouse, and a long red-and-white striped barrier arm on a counter-lever. A guard with a machine gun, wearing newish fatigues and a black beret, strolled out of the guardhouse as the truck ground to a halt.