Rogue mission, p.15
Rogue Mission, page 15
Gallo didn’t wait. Three bullets, and he dropped three men in a row. The men slumped to the floor, chairs sliding, their guns thumping on the wood.
Then there was quiet.
Smoke hung in the air.
“Goddard, shut that door,” Troy said. “Hold it shut.”
Just before Goddard closed it, the barman appeared, coming down the hall with a sawed-off pool cue. Troy pointed his gun at the man.
“Stay back!”
“Qendro jashte!” Dubois shouted.
Troy looked at her.
“Do you speak every language on Earth?”
Goddard slammed the door shut.
“Put your foot on it. Don’t let him come in here.”
There was one Albanian left alive in the room. He was curled on the floor behind the table. He had long hair and was thin. He had dropped his gun. Troy watched as Gallo kicked the gun away. Gallo pointed his gun down at the man. Gallo had just killed three without breaking a sweat. That was some pretty fancy shooting.
“You speak English?” Troy said to the man on the floor.
“Yes.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Where is Kelmendi?”
“He’s here, on the floor.”
“This is him,” Dubois said. She was standing above a crumpled corpse in jeans and a dark striped dress shirt, who was completely bald. “I recognize him from the photos.”
Oh, man. There goes Jan’s invaluable resource.
“I guess we’re not going to evacuate him now,” Gallo said.
“He would have been useless to you,” the long-haired guy said. “His word was a lifetime bond. He never talked to police. We called him Iron Jaw.”
Troy looked at the long-haired guy. “Why did you shoot?”
“We thought you were the Ulic.”
Troy stared at him. “The what?”
“Ulic. The rival clan. You don’t know this family? We have a feud with them.”
Troy shook his head. “We said police.”
“A Ulic will say anything. They have no honor.”
“You need better doors, in that case. If you think someone’s coming to kill you, these doors are…” Troy trailed off. “They’re no good.”
“Next time,” Gallo said. He surveyed the dead. “I guess these guys learned their lesson.”
Gallo was back doing his comedy routine, and time was wasting. They needed to get out of here before the Albanian cops came.
Troy crouched next to the last surviving man. He pointed his gun at the guy’s head in a casual, sort of offhand manner. Just two guys chatting, one guy about to blow a hole in the other guy’s temple.
“It doesn’t matter at this point,” Troy said. “We just killed a bunch of your men. We didn’t mean to, but things happen sometimes. I need some information from you. I think you must have it. You were friends with Kelmendi, were you not?”
“I worked for him.”
Troy shrugged. “Let’s try it. I’ll start with this. I’m going to kill you if I think you’re lying to me, okay? Where are the girls that were kidnapped in England? Especially the one that was taken two nights ago, but really all of them.”
He pressed the barrel of the gun directly to the man’s head.
The man didn’t hesitate. All this talk of a code of silence, and your word being a sacred bond—it didn’t seem to reach him. This guy didn’t want to get killed like his friends. He seemed to want no part of any of this.
“I know where the girls are,” he said.
“So speak!” Goddard blurted. “This man is going to shoot you. If he doesn’t, I will. My sister is one of those girls.”
The long-haired guy stared at Goddard for a long second. If he had been on the fence at all, Goddard seemed to have decided him. Maybe it humanized the situation for him. Every time they kidnapped someone, there were family members heartbroken. Maybe he’d never thought about that before. Maybe he had a younger sister, and only now realized what it would mean to lose her.
“There’s a wharf in the city of Durres,” he said. “It’s the major port. Not far from here. Directly west. Straight across the water from there to Italy. Wharf 18 sticks out on a little outcrop of land. There is a warehouse. The girls are always held in that warehouse before the ship leaves. It’s an open secret. They wait there, and then are loaded onto the boat.”
“Does the boat go to Italy?”
The man shook his head. “First to Libya. Prices are agreed, and then they go to the final destination, whatever that may be. Differs each time. Depends on price. Depends on who is bidding. Could be Dubai. Could be Saudi Arabia. Could be further south, for an African warlord.”
He looked directly at Dubois. “Warlords can get all the dark meat they want. White meat, they have to import. And they have to pay.”
“Lovely,” Dubois said. “Thanks for that.”
“We’re taking you with us,” Troy said. “If you’re lying, I’m going to shoot you.”
The guy shrugged. He seemed to know a lot.
“Okay.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
7:30 p.m. Central European Time
Wharf 18
Port of Durres
Durres, Albania
The long-haired man’s name was Qemal.
They left him in the small, boxy Fiat, his hands zip-tied behind his back, his ankles zip-tied together, a rag from the back room of the bar stuffed in his mouth, and another one tied over his eyes as a blindfold. They pushed him down sideways in the back seat of the car. They engaged the child locks to keep him inside. They confiscated his telephone.
“You think that’s good enough?” Dubois said.
Stark shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s either that, or just shoot him.”
Dubois sighed. “All right. We’ll leave him like that.”
Durres was a port city on the Adriatic Sea, not half an hour from Tirana. It was basically the same metropolitan area. There was a lot of activity along the waterfront in the city center. Small cruise ships were docked at a passenger terminal. There were mid-sized container ships being loaded and unloaded by enormous cranes. There were ten- and twenty-story apartment buildings, and a brightly lit area of restaurants and bars. It was a modernized, apparently thriving city.
But not here, not along Wharf 18.
This was the forgotten section of Durres, a couple of kilometers away from downtown.
They were in a nearly empty parking lot near the docks. There was an old box truck in the parking lot, but no other cars. The truck had no obvious markings on it, other than some sign or logo that had been covered over in heavy white paint. You could smuggle people in that truck, if they were quiet enough. Human traffickers had ways of keeping people quiet.
The smell of untreated sewage wafted up from a drainage pipe running down to the sea. From here, a narrow peninsula stretched out into the water, maybe two hundred meters long. It was man-made, built of concrete, and poorly maintained. An old three-story warehouse building was perched out at the end of the wharf. A small container ship was docked down there.
The wharf was little more than a seawall. Entry was guarded by a gatehouse, and a chain-link fence topped with looping razor wire. In the glow of weak yellow sodium arc lamps, Dubois could see that the warehouse at the far end was mostly dark. There might be one or two lights on in a room on the top floor.
Fog rolled in off the water. Dubois and Stark and Goddard walked toward the gate, three silhouettes moving in the fog, like ancient stone statues, Easter Island heads that had come to life. Stark was carrying a large pair of bolt cutters. He was the biggest of the three, and his shadow made the bolt cutters look like some kind of medieval weapon. He could be the warrior, accompanied by his attendants.
As they walked, a fourth silhouette joined them. Gallo. He had ridden his motorcycle here.
The whole area seemed closed down, a wasteland. The road was potholed and pitted. There were discarded cans and broken bottles strewn all over the pavement.
Up ahead, the gatehouse was dark and empty.
“Nobody home,” Gallo said. “Not much security.”
“No.”
“They’re the mob. They probably think you’d be a fool to enter here.”
“In that case, I suppose we should just let ourselves in.”
There was a heavy chain with a padlock keeping the gate closed. They had scoped this out before parking the car. Troy went to the gate, lifted the cutters, and clipped the lock easily. He let the chain snake to the ground. The gate was on rollers, but the rollers were in good shape. The gate seemed to be the only functional thing around here. Dubois pushed it open easily.
As she pushed it, she sighed to herself.
“All right,” she whispered.
The decision was made. The weight of it settled onto her shoulders like the giant stone that Sisyphus carried. She had seen enough action now to know the truth. People were about to die. Four men had just died at that club in Tirana. Two men had died in the flat at Battersea.
All those people had died on the runaway train in the Alps. More had died at CERN. She flashed back to the cellar auction in Algiers. She had left that one right before the shooting started. Stark had massacred human traffickers, had rescued a kidnapped girl, and somehow made it out alive.
Everywhere El Grupo went, every job they worked, people died. Never in her career before this had she seen so much violent death, so much shooting. Before recent months, in ten years at Interpol, she hadn’t so much as discharged her firearm outside the practice range.
She breathed heavily.
“You all right, Dubois?” It was Stark.
“Here we go again,” she said.
Stark nodded. “That’s right. That’s my girl.”
She nearly laughed, but stopped herself.
“I’m not your girl.”
Is that true anymore?
Dubois herself didn’t even know.
They moved up the wharf. A handful of overhead sodium arcs gave off bleak yellow light. Most of them were out, so the group passed in and out of shadow. They passed an old double car seat, like a low-slung leather couch. The warehouse building was just up ahead, tattered, nondescript, and gone to seed. But Dubois had been right before—there were a couple of lights on behind upstairs windows.
“Watch those windows,” Troy said. “Watch for any doors, alleys, little cracks that people can squeeze themselves into. Overcommunicate. You see a flash, assume it’s a muzzle flash, and call it out. They might have silencers. We could be sitting ducks out here.”
They had killed Armend Kelmendi, the man Interpol and other police agencies had code named Cyclops. The man who had been feeding law enforcement a wealth of information about the secretive world of Albanian gangsters. He was dead.
There was going to be a lot of explaining to do.
She was beginning to see things the way Troy Stark must see them. If they somehow saved the missing women, or even just the ambassador’s daughter, then killing the informant would be forgiven. Or maybe “forgiven” was too strong a word. It would have to be overlooked. The people who were upset by it would have to swallow their anger. The bad thing El Grupo had done would be superseded, and nearly erased, by a higher good.
Miquel must also see things this way. Stark and Miquel, for all their differences in age and personality, had this in common. They would risk everything to achieve that one end no one could argue against. If the girls were saved, the informant no longer mattered.
They were approaching the rusty cargo ship, which was resting at the dock to their left. The ship was secured tightly to the pier with giant shipping chains. It was old, paint flaking off of it. There were giant holes in the steel where the rust had simply eaten through. To the untrained eye, the boat did not look seaworthy. Even so, it looked like something that the coast guard might take an interest in. As a rule, smugglers avoided the coast guard when they could.
Unless they just pay them off.
“This thing’s been sitting here since the commies left town,” Gallo said.
“See anything?” Stark said.
“Nothing. All clear so far.”
“There’s another boat down at the end,” Goddard said.
He was right. Tied up at the far end of the wharf was a small speedboat. It was much more modern than the cargo ship, but too small to hide captives. It was just a couple of outboard motors, a panel with a steering wheel and controls for the captain, and an area near the bow where a few people could sit. The speedboat rose and fell on the swells, loosely attached to the dock, as if someone had barely tied it before jumping out and running off somewhere.
Dubois looked up at the warehouse. The gate at the front had been locked.
Did that mean whoever tied up that boat was inside?
The warehouse was long. It appeared to have been made of brick in some forgotten era. There was corrugated metal attached to its facade, to protect it from the elements. Here and there, the metal was gone—detached, fallen off, discarded, forgotten—exposing the crumbling brickwork underneath.
There were vertical doors, like garage doors, also made of some corrugated material. They continued in a line down the length of the building. The doors were caked in rust. Everything was quiet. The only sound was the ancient cargo ship straining against its chains.
Gallo bent to one and gripped the handle. He turned it, and it gave him no resistance.
He looked back at the three others gathered there.
“Ready?”
There was nothing else to do.
“Do it,” Stark said.
Gallo took a deep breath and yanked the door up. The door was a thin sheet, and made a soft grinding noise as it rolled upwards along its track.
They entered the warehouse. It was dark, and the ceiling was high above them. Dubois peered into the gloom. There might be a walkway or some kind of iron catwalk up there. Pigeons or other birds, or maybe bats, flew from one place to another up near the rafters. Pigeons, they were pigeons. She could hear them coo softly high up in the darkness. A few of them made flapping and squawking noises. They must have been disturbed by the sound of the door opening, and the weak light streaming in from outside.
As Dubois’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she could make out shapes scattered throughout the warehouse. Crates, boxes, and barrels were haphazardly stacked on top of each other. Some were covered in dust and cobwebs, while others seemed relatively new. The floors were rough concrete, and the walls looked like they’d been patched together in places with some kind of fast-drying cement.
Gallo moved out into the center of the space, his gun drawn.
“This looks like a bust.”
“I promised Qemal I was gonna kill him if he lied,” Stark said.
“I guess you’ll have to kill him,” Goddard said.
Stark shrugged. “We’ll see. We’re not done here just yet.”
Along the far wall were three heavy steel doors.
“Dubois, you got a flashlight?” Stark said.
“Yes.”
“Come with me a second.”
Dubois followed Stark across the warehouse to the doors. She pulled the flashlight from her utility belt. Stark reached the first door and tried the latch. It turned.
“Let’s have it, please. Just a little bit of light.”
Dubois clicked the flashlight to its weakest setting. She turned it on, pointing it at the floor. The light pooled around her feet.
Stark pushed the door open, gun raised and ready. He burst in, Dubois a step behind him. She moved the light around the walls, the floor, everywhere. There was a long wooden bench, with steel manacles built into it. There was a window high on the wall, which appeared to have been painted over with black paint. There were dust motes floating in the air. There was a heavy layer of dust on the bench. There was no one in here.
“Definitely a place to hold prisoners,” Dubois whispered.
“Once upon a time,” Stark said.
They stepped out and moved to the next door. It also opened easily. It was another dusty cell, again with no one inside. There was no one here. Where did they put the prisoners? Dubois began to get a sinking feeling. The Albanians had taken the victims somewhere else.
Qemal hadn’t been lying, not necessarily. This was a place they once trafficked people through. They just didn’t use it anymore.
This whole trip could turn out to be for nothing.
She and Stark went to the last door.
Stark tried the handle. It was locked.
He stopped. She could hear him breathing.
He looked at Dubois. In the glow from her flashlight, his face seemed to hover in darkness, like some malevolent spirit.
“I’m gonna shoot the lock.”
Dubois glanced around the vastness of the warehouse. It towered above them, hiding its secrets. Anything could be here, or anyone.
“That might bring someone,” she said.
“Good,” Stark said. “I think we need people at this point.”
He looked back into the gloom.
“Gallo!”
The voice came back. “What?” It was impossible to say where Gallo was now.
“Get ready. Something might happen here. I’m about to shoot out a lock.”
“I’m already ready. Goddard, you ready?”
“I’m ready,” Goddard said. His voice sounded oddly small, not nearly as boisterous and confident as Gallo’s. Dubois shook her head. Gallo had gotten clobbered again and again in his time with El Grupo. He didn’t seem to mind one bit.
People were built differently.
Stark addressed the door. He shouted at it. “If you can hear me in there, stay as far away from the door as you can!”
If they were operating in secrecy before, that was over.
Dubois stepped back and to the side of the door. Stark did the same. He fired into the lock, his gunshot echoing throughout the warehouse, his muzzle flash leaving imprints on Dubois’s eyes.
Once, and the bullet ricocheted and whined off into the dark. Twice, and the bullet punched a hole through the mechanism. Three times, and the lock shattered and came apart. Metal fell to the concrete floor. The door swung open just a bit, all by itself.
