by Dana Haynes
“God … didn’t …”
“I know. I got you.”
In the corridor, the soldier struggled to rise. Finnigan picked up the Halligan, swung it overhand, cracked it against the man’s hand. Fine bones crackled. The man shrieked.
“Get up!” Finnigan shouted, hoping he spoke English. “House is coming down. Get out!”
In his arm, Shan gasped. “Hel … Hélene …”
“She’s safe, man. You did it. We got her.”
C74
Alarms shrilled. With a tortured crack, part of the second floor began to collapse.
Driton Basha made it to the master suite, with its 120-degree, curved floor-to-ceiling windows facing the North Sea. The suite was spacious, with low ceilings and recessed lights. The bed itself was huge, more or less square, as wide as it was long, with a thick ruffled comforter in Easter-egg colors.
Basha shouldered his way into the room and spotted Miloš Aleksić lying facedown on the bed, wearing pinstriped trousers and one sock, no shoes, and an undershirt. Three bottles of whiskey, mostly empty, lay or stood on the side table. An alarm clock was visible through a standing bottle, its number bloated and deformed by the curve of the glass, blinking 12:00.
The siren shut up and the lights shut off as the power failed in the building.
Marija Aleksić sat on the edge of the bed in a long skirt and twin set, with her matching pearl necklace and earrings. She held a Colt .45 revolver, which looked comically oversized in her dainty hands. She just stared at Basha standing in the doorway, water dripping off his clothes.
Miloš Aleksić snored.
“Muslims?” she asked in a casual, street voice.
Basha wished. “Mercenaries. Bounty hunters. We—”
The left-most pane of glass in the window shattered as its frame warped. Lightning-bolt cracks spread across the ceiling, and Basha felt the floorboards reverberate under his boots.
“We have to hurry, ma’am. Miloš—”
“—is not the man I’d hoped he would be.” Marija turned at the waist, placed the revolver against the back of her husband’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The boom was ungodly loud, and the blast spread the man’s skull and brains and spinal fluid in a florid fan across the mint-green accent wall beyond the bed. His body twitched once, as if an electric current passed through it, then settled again into the divot he’d occupied in the bedspread.
“Jesus!”
Marija turned back to the major. She rubbed her wrist, sore from the recoil. “Goodness, that’s loud.”
Basha gaped. Blood glistened on her ivory silhouette broach, and dripped off her forearm.
“I couldn’t be a soldier, Driton. My family would never have permitted it. I am not a politician. I did not study law. I have served our people as well as I could, in the only way I knew how.”
“We have to leave! Now! We—”
“I supported Milošević. I stood in awe as this great man explained to the world the moral imperative of ethnic cleansing.”
Basha’s mind whirled. The psychotic bitch is giving a speech?
“I thought perhaps his administration would rid us of the Muslim threat for—”
Fiero swept into the room. Her eyes locked on the armed woman sitting by the headless cadaver on the bed.
Basha reacted quickly, throwing back an elbow, catching her square in the chest. Her clavicle cracked. She gasped and stumbled back, her gun falling to the floor.
Basha turned and grabbed her by the throat, raising his own gun.
Fiero smashed her knuckles into the inside of his elbow and his hand spasmed open, the gun spiraling away.
Basha dragged her over his hip and used a judo throw, sending her crashing into the carpet.
Fiero hit the ground and scissor-kicked, taking Basha’s ankles out from under him. He landed on his ass.
Fiero rolled over, her left knee pinning down his gun hand, threw her right knee over his chest, and punched him in the throat.
Basha used his superior mass and strong legs to buck her off. She did a somersault, coming out of it into a standing crouch.
Basha rose, too, holding a gun.
But the blow to his windpipe had taken the fight out of him.
Fiero pivoted and kicked, her boot higher than her own head. Her heel shattered Basha’s nose and sent bits of cartilage and bone ricocheting into his brain.
The dead man stood a moment, but only because his autonomic nervous system hadn’t gotten the message yet.
That’s all that saved Fiero.
Marija Aleksić raised the long-barreled Colt in both hands and aimed at her. Fiero spotted it and ducked as Basha’s body swayed unsteadily on its feet. She put the dead major between herself and the big revolver.
Marija fired, the sound deafening. The bullet smashed into Basha’s back, dug through his chest, exited under his pectoral, and ripped a gouge out of Fiero’s right arm.
Basha’s corpse folded into her and they both tumbled.
Fiero struggled to free herself from the dead weight, her own torso and arms now covered in his blood and hers. She felt something hard under his left thigh and reached for it.
Basha’s Glock.
Marija tried to aim at her. But firing the big Colt twice had cost her dearly. She could barely lift it, and the recoil had sent pain reverberating through her hands and wrists and elbows. She struggled to aim.
Fiero, up on one elbow, legs trapped under the corpse, drew Basha’s auto left-handed and aimed first.
Marija paused, then let the cumbersome gun come to rest in her lap.
The house shuddered.
Fiero kept the pistol steady as she fought to get her legs out from beneath Basha. Pushing with her right arm brought searing pain that jolted up through her shoulder.
Marija studied her. Fiero freed her legs.
“Driton told me about a bounty hunter who rescued the Muslim scum. St. Nicholas. He said a woman was among them. A Muslim woman. Is that you?”
Fiero rose to her feet. Water-soaked hair hung before her face, and blood oozed down her right arm, dripping off her knuckles.
She surprised herself. “Yes. I’m a Muslim woman.” And thought, ridiculously, If my mother could see me now!
That was shock setting in, she realized.
The house groaned. A guillotine of plate glass, hanging from the upper frame of the shattered window, broke free and fell to the floor. Shattered shards bloomed in every direction.
Marija didn’t appear to hear it. “Will the major’s men succeed in killing the judge?”
“They won’t. She’s safe.”
Marija’s shoulders slumped. “How fitting, that a Muslim like you would destroy everything.”
“You’re the one behind all this? Behind your son?”
Marija said, “I’m a patriot. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Fiero fought the pulsing pain. She held the Glock in her left hand and snapped her head to the side, hair swinging away from her eyes. “You’re Lazar’s mother. He’s your only son?”
“He is.”
“I imprisoned him. For life. He’ll die there.”
A dark cloud occluded Marija’s eyes. A bottomless well of hate rose, contorting her face. She looked to her right, at the corpse of her husband. She looked back at the major’s body, crumbled artlessly, like garbage tossed to the ash heap.
She looked Fiero in the eye.
“A foolish name. St. Nicholas!”
“The patron saint of the necessary.”
“The necessary?”
Fiero said, “Yes,” and shot Marija Aleksić in the forehead.
C75
Finnigan got Shan to the five-car garage and selected a brand-new Lexus coupe with diplomatic plates. He got the Englishman lying down in th
e back seat before he noticed two Iraqi boys, standing and shivering on the far side of the car, their eyes like saucers.
“Go!” Finnigan bellowed and waved his gun.
The kids tore out of there and sped across the spacious lawn, leaping over the tire tracks gouged into the pristine grass. Finnigan watched and spotted the soldier he’d kicked in the balls, just now painfully climbing over the ruined stone fence.
Finnigan ran back toward the house.
As he did, Fiero appeared in a second-floor window. She swung one long leg out onto the roof, then twisted and followed with her torso and shoulders, her head, and her brace leg. She turned and Finnigan saw water and blood dripping off her clothes.
He peered up at her.
She made the cutthroat gesture, her hand to her neck, and he understood what that meant. She began using a rose bush’s lattice to climb down.
Finnigan ran into the ruined house. He climbed up onto the running board of the cement truck and activated the slowly revolving cauldron. With a bass groan, it began to rotate along its long axis.
Their resident thief, Sally Blue, had said the various alarms at the house would make sneaking onto the property difficult. That’s why Finnigan decided to use a truck and to ram his way in, setting off every alarm all at once to slow down the defenders’ response through shock-and-awe. But he specifically selected a cement truck with a full load of cement to bollix the crime scene. In the event that he, Fiero, and Shan got away today, he didn’t want local police knocking on their door in the next few days. Nothing screws up a crime scene like a ton of wet cement. He quickly wiped down the cab for fingerprints. He got out and hit the lever to begin dumping wet cement into the spacious living room.
He caught up to Fiero in the garage. “You’re bleeding?”
She’d grabbed a clean shop rag from the tall tool kit and was using her teeth to tie it around her upper arm. “Shan?”
He led her to the Lexus and showed her their friend, passed out in the back seat and ruining the creamy upholstery. Finnigan climbed in behind the wheel and Fiero took shotgun, but sitting backward, reaching over the headrest to brush stray blond hair away from Shan’s good eye.
“Katalin,” the Englishman murmured. He dredged up the macabre ghost of a smile.
“You can’t die. We haven’t been paid.”
“Might’ve … misplaced checkbook …”
She leaned over the seatback and felt her eyes turn hot. She blinked back tears. “Shhh. We have you.”
Finnigan pulled away and raced down the curved path for the gate. He noticed the part of the wall he’d smashed through; the impact had knocked over the gate. They spotted the two Iraqi brothers, sprinting into the cluster of trees that Finnigan had used earlier to hide the cement truck.
The partners and Shan Greyson were a good three kilometers from the collapsing flying saucer house when they passed the first of seven police cars, racing the opposite direction.
Kosovar Team One, under the command of Basha’s senior officer, waited for the refugees with their suicide vests to arrive. When they failed to show—and the truck didn’t reply to radio calls—the captain decided they could wait no longer. He sent the order to his lieutenant in the Fireplace Room.
The lieutenant rose from his table and tapped the false code into the ten-key pad on the wall, announcing a terrorist assault on the building. He waited to hear the alarm and frowned as the silence reigned. Three seconds later, guards with machine guns stormed in from the kitchen door. The lieutenant was on his knees, hands laced behind his head, in under ten seconds.
Team One stormed the historic house of the tailor, Pieter de Key, expecting to find Judge Hélene Betancourt emerging from an escape tunnel. Instead, they faced a fully armed and armored counter-terrorism unit with gas masks and bulletproof shields. A few shots were fired, but most of the Kosovars followed their captain’s lead and dropped their weapons without incident.
The Public Affairs Officer of the International Criminal Court held a press conference, in which she tied the attempted attack on Judge Betancourt with the rescue of the refugee children in Belgrade and Sarajevo. A very young reporter recently hired by the Times of London, Jane Koury, covered the press conference and got her first byline on Page 1, above the fold.
Hélene Betancourt pulled strings at a private hospital outside Amsterdam, on whose board of directors she sat. Shan Greyson was taken there, and a team of top-flight trauma surgeons worked on him for six hours before announcing that he was out of the woods. They saved his eye but couldn’t be sure if he’d ever walk again. However, he would live.
The doctors also treated an unnamed woman—tall, dark of hair and skin—with a gunshot wound to her right arm and a cracked sternum. The woman left in the company of a wavy-haired American who seemed to complain a lot.
Judge Betancourt handled all of the medical bills. Someone apparently forgot to alert the police that one person had been tortured and another shot.
The appropriate paperwork went missing.
C76
A week passed.
In Kyrenia, Cyprus, Lachlan Sumner relaxed by taking apart the Pratt & Whitney engines of their beloved de Havilland DHC-6-300 Twin Otter. He stripped them down and tuned everything himself.
Bridget Sumner updated the partners on the business of their business, including expenses accrued in Italy, France, Slovenia, Serbia, and the Netherlands. She announced that a check had been cut by one of the elegant, historic, and deeply corrupt Cypriot banks and deposited in their own elegant, historic, and deeply corrupt Cypriot bank. No forensic accountant on the planet would ever find a link between the transaction and the Honorable Hélene Betancourt.
Finnigan asked Bridget to use some of the proceeds to lease a spacious house perched high on a cliff in beautiful Bellapais, just outside Kyrenia, for the remainder of the summer and fall. As soon as his doctors gave the okay, Shan Greyson would be convalescing in the Mediterranean sun.
Fiero took two days off and visited her parents in Madrid. She made up a story about hurting her arm in a car accident. Her parents wanted to know about her work as an analyst for the European Union, and they wanted details about her relationship with Michael Patrick Finnigan.
Khadija Dahar wanted to know if it was true romance.
“It’s true,” her daughter said. “It’s not romance.”
Alexandro Fiero bemoaned the stories coming out of the Netherlands and Serbia regarding the admirable Aleksić family, including the tragic homicides of Marija and Miloš Aleksić. Surely the macabre stories of their son’s crimes were being hyped by the international media!
“Surely,” his daughter muttered.
Finnigan, for his part, flew commercial to Newark and met with several contacts in the US Justice Department, who confirmed the news that an assistant district attorney in New York was putting together a case—a new case, a big case—against former NYPD captain Patrick Finnigan. The sources wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go on the record. But the case was described as “open and shut” and “a career-maker.”
He visited his mom in Queens. He ate unbelievably good pastrami, as well as world-class bagels. He ordered a box of Dunkin’ Donuts and had them FedExed to Ways & Means in Varenna, Italy.
He took a subway into Manhattan and ate a sandwich across the street from a Starbucks and an NYPD precinct building. It took forty minutes before he spotted Sgt. Nicole Finnigan and two other female cops, stepping out for coffee.
Nicole looked good. She looked strong and happy.
Finnigan finished his sandwich and headed back.
Finnigan had time to visit his father on Long Island. He even drove close enough to see the house. He never climbed out of the car.
Police continued to investigate the deaths of Marija and Miloš Aleksić. The first day of the investigation was hampered by the hazards of the flying saucer house—investigators determined that it wa
s too dangerous to enter due to the structural damage caused by the cement truck. To add to the complications, the truck had dumped its load of wet cement, which inundated the ground floor and essentially tombed-off the basement and wine cellar of the great house. Engineers pored over the house for a day and a half before the first-responders were allowed to enter.
When they finally gained entrance, police found three bodies in the master suite. Marija and Miloš Aleksić lay on their bed, crosswise to each other, arms and legs spread, and looked like nothing so much as a human hashtag. A third body lay on the floor near the bed. They linked a gun in the hands of Marija Aleksić to the bullet that had taken off her husband’s head. That gun also was linked to the chest wound of an as-yet unidentified male. That corpse held an Austrian-made pistol which, tests showed, had shot Marija Aleksić between the eyes.
The obvious conclusion was a love triangle gone horribly awry.
That theory would be blown to hell in a month when a fourth body—that of a Kosovar soldier carrying a machine gun, a bullet wound through the top of his skull—would be jackhammered out of the cement in the living room, and when investigators found the remains of a military bivouac in the house’s basement, complete with firearms, ammunition, and blueprints of the International Criminal Court complex.
The partners didn’t properly reconnect until eight days after leaving The Hague aboard the de Havilland. They met in the Turkish restaurant below their office and above the winding and scenic boardwalk that surrounded the tiny, picturesque marina. Finnigan got there first and ordered bread and hummus and olives, plus a red wine from a vineyard co-owned by Alexandro Fiero.
His partner arrived on the new motorbike she’d just purchased—she’d gotten a taste for them in Italy. And besides, the leather went well with her goth/bad-girl fashion sense.
“Riding a motorcycle with a bullet wound to your arm and a cracked sternum,” Finnigan said. “That seems reasonable.”