Andrew Gross - Reckless

“You think you can manage to tail the guy without blowing your cover?” she asked, a little peeved. “But hey,” she betrayed a smile. “Thanks.”

Thibault backed the Audi around and started to make his way down the winding road.

Hauck said, “I better go. Whenever I get to where he’s going, I’ll check in with you.” He squeezed her on the arm. “You be careful in there, okay?”

“You too, Ty. No heroics. Remember, I’m responsible for you.”

With a last wink, Hauck headed down the steep embankment to where they had left the car. Thibault had a bit of a head start, but Hauck knew what he was driving and figured traffic would be light. He finally made it down to the road, hopped into the driver’s seat of their Ford, and did a U-ey in a clearing on the deserted road, starting after the Audi with his headlights off. As he passed through the woods heading back to the road to Novi Pazar, he finally caught sight of it.

Thibault had pulled up for a moment at the turnoff. He stopped too. Then the Audi turned left on the road toward town.

Hauck slowed, and when he got to the intersection, he put on his lights. The Audi was a minute or so ahead of him. But it was starting to get dark and they were the only ones on the road. As they climbed up over the pass, he saw the Audi’s taillights in the distance.

Heading to Novi Pazar.

It took about fifteen minutes to reach the outskirts of town. Hauck narrowed the distance as the main road fed into the town and traffic picked up. At a circle, he let a slower fuel truck and a minivan sneak in between them to conceal his pursuit. At an intersection, Thibault accelerated through a light that was about to change and Hauck had to zip around the truck so as not to lose him, then fell a few car lengths back.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t been spotted. The Audi wove through the main thoroughfare, turned down a side street near the river, and pulled to a stop, parking on the sidewalk. Hauck slowed, passing by, and eyed a brightly lit bar with a frosted glass façade and a sign with old-fashioned American lettering that said O’FLYNN’S CHICAGO-STYLE BAR, like some garish American sports bar. Probably the local hangout. Through his rearview mirror, Hauck saw Thibault climb out, flick the automatic lock of the car, and go inside.

Hauck continued on the narrow side street and squeezed into a spot in front of a brick building that had a yogurt billboard in Serbian with a photo of Ana Ivanovic, the pretty tennis player, on the side of it. He locked the car and stepped around the side to the main street. He pulled his cap down over his brow. In front, a man and woman came out, almost bumping into him, speaking loudly in Serbian. “Izvinite,” Hauck grunted under his breath. Excuse me. He peered inside the frosted windows. A Heineken beer sign. Inside, the bar was dark. And crowded. The din that escaped was loud.

There was always the chance he was walking into a trap. No heroics…

He went around the side. There was a small deck overlooking the river. Six or seven tables on it, mostly young people drinking, eating, under beer umbrellas. Hauck followed a waitress through a rear door. A wave of noise hit him at the entrance.

He made his way inside.

The main bar was raucous and packed with people. Women crowded the wooden bar surrounded by local types. Everyone was smoking. Some looked like businessmen; others hunched over tables, drinking beer, smoking, gesturing at the large TV screen above. A soccer game was on that a lot of people seemed to be watching. When the ball went down one side, the bar seemed to erupt in cheers. The women were laughing, chattering, looking like secretaries out on the make. The local beer, Jemel, was flowing.

Hauck made his way up to the end of the bar and lost himself in a crowd. Just like in New York, he recalled. He looked around for Thibault, searching for his face through the haze of smoke and patrons.

He finally found him sitting alone at a table near the far end of the bar, sipping a beer.

Thibault was looking directly at him.

Naomi wound her way down to the farmhouse. She waited a few minutes to make certain Thibault wasn’t coming back. It had become dark, and the path down was treacherous with sliding rocks and false steps, even with her flashlight, causing her to stumble and almost fall several times along the way.

Thank God Ty was following Thibault.

As she watched the house her blood started to race. The dark silence of the unfamiliar valley and realizing just what she was about to get herself into gave her one of the deepest feelings of loneliness and isolation she had ever felt. She begged her heart to calm down. There was no one there, nothing to be afraid of. She kept telling herself that this was the right thing to do. Still, her heart wouldn’t quite respond. A thought passed through her that would have made her laugh if she wasn’t so afraid: What’ve you gotten yourself involved in, Naomi?

She wasn’t a desk agent anymore.

When she was certain Thibault wasn’t returning, she darted across the mountain road, careful to avoid leaving imprints from her sneakers in the gravel. She moved over to the arched, wood-planked front door. The latch was locked. Shit. She poked her light through a crack in the shuttered window. She couldn’t see much. The lights inside were dimmed.

She hurried around the side. It was a stone and stucco cottage, could have been built a hundred years ago. The brush that crept up to the side of the house was sparse. Cautiously, she peered in through a cracked shutter. She could see an open kitchen with a large stone hearth. She tried the door off the kitchen. The iron latch didn’t budge either. Damn. She continued on around back.

She knew she had the time, the time to sort it all out and be careful, but her heart was thumping and she wanted to get this over with, and she didn’t want to take the chance that someone, anyone, might show up at the house. She peered into what looked like a bedroom window. She knew if she had to she could break the pane of glass. They knew where Thibault was. They knew what car he was driving, what name he was traveling under. They could always find him. Busting the window would blow their secrecy. But what was important was finding out what he knew.

She checked the shuttered windows along the back and, to her elation, saw that one of them was cracked.

She slid her fingers underneath the sill and jerked upward. To her relief, the window lifted. She wiggled a space just wide enough for her body to slip through and climbed inside. She was right; it was a bedroom. In fact, it seemed to be the one Thibault was using. His clothes were strewn haphazardly about a chair; the open suitcase she had seen Maria Radisovic bring in was on the floor. The bed was mussed.

She was in.

In the front room she spotted a breakfast table in a nook outside the kitchen that Thibault seemed to be using as his work space. There was a small TV that was hooked up to a satellite. There was a laptop set up on the table. Some books, papers stacked around. Naomi sat down and inserted a download flash drive in the USB port and tried to log on. Not surprisingly, the prompt came up for a password.

Damn.

Thibault had to have records. Records of who he communicated with. His financial interactions. The money flow. She was certain she’d find all that inside. The thought passed through her that maybe she ought to just take it. That it didn’t matter anymore, this cat-and-mouse. What was important was to track the trail to someone higher. Where this conspiracy led.

She tried to bypass the security but it proved to be futile. Pulse racing, she turned her attention to the papers scattered all over the table. She rifled through the files, mostly financial papers-partnership agreements, corporate documents, deal brochures. She had no idea if these were legitimate or part of Thibault’s illicit doings. But he’d brought them with him, so she assumed they must have some value. She laid them out on the table and snapped pictures of the cover pages, focusing on the corporate logos. There was a stack of business cards bound together by a rubber band. Naomi unfastened them and began to leaf through.