Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

“Who is it?”

In the last failing glimmers of sunlight, Annika’s carnelian eyes seemed so lucid it was possible to believe he could see clear through them into her soul. This was one of the unique assets with which God and her mother had blessed her.

“Tell me, Jack, have you ever heard of the Syrian?”

“ANNIKA DEMENTIEVA has entered Albania.”

The Syrian, listening to this news, found that his knuckles had gone white where they gripped his satellite phone. Involuntarily, he moved farther away from Arian Xhafa, who was embroiled with Caroline in another of their religio-political-postfeminist debates. The Syrian found them amusing, but Xhafa, true to his nature, took them as deadly serious.

“Where in Albania?” he said, when he’d gone outside.

“Vlorë.”

Then she must know, the Syrian said to himself. He heard the snuffling of the dogs as they scented him, saw the deep bowl of the sky, indigo at its apex. A gaudy sunset began to show itself. Tree frogs and crickets started up.

To the man on the other end of the line, he said, “Do you have a specific fix on her?”

“She’s been shadowed from the moment she flew in.”

The Syrian made an instant decision. “Then take care of the situation at once. I don’t want Xhafa getting wind that she’s nearby. Take her to the safehouse. You know which one.”

There was an instant’s hesitation. “She isn’t alone.”

The Syrian closed his eyes. “How many?”

“Three. A man, a girl, and a boy.”

Not so many, he thought. “I want her alive. Terminate the rest of them.”

“Your will, my hand.”

The Syrian put away the sat phone. He spent about fifteen seconds wondering what Annika was doing with a girl and a boy, but soon a landslide of business matters dismissed the thought from his mind, and it did not resurface until much later.

“I THINK we ought to move to a more secure location,” Annika said. She gestured. “I have a car waiting.”

“I promised Alli I’d let her talk to you about Liridona.”

Annika looked around. “In the car.”

“Why did you want to meet in such an open space?”

“Trust,” Annika said. “I wanted you to feel perfectly comfortable.”

He nodded, but said nothing. Gesturing to Alli and Thatë, he walked with Annika into the deep shadow of a thin line of trees within which an enormous car was waiting, its engine thrumming in a deep register.

“I should introduce the kid,” he said, as Alli and Thatë came up to them.

“No need.” Annika grinned at Thatë. “He works for me.”

Thatë and Alli got in the front seat with the driver, leaving Jack and Annika standing beside the open rear door.

“One of these days,” Jack said, “you’re going to give me a heart attack with your surprises.”

“God forbid!”

She placed a hand on his arm. It was a spontaneous gesture and yet it set off a fireworks display inside him. She must have somehow felt the ripple because she smiled.

“Oh, Jack, I never want to hurt you again.”

“But you will.”

“Not deliberately, this I swear to you.”

She leaned in and the kiss she gave him was as tentative as that first enigmatic smile. She drew back, but he caught her behind her neck, pulled her to him, and kissed her as he’d dreamed of kissing her in a reality he’d never thought could exist again.

He felt the world drop away from him. All that existed was the two of them, locked together, falling through space and time, back to when they had been together in the Ukraine last year, before the betrayal that was still a betrayal, but on another, slighter order of magnitude. A betrayal that could be forgiven without damages being assessed.

The pines above them shook and shivered, clouds passed by overhead, and the velvet evening seemed to wrap them in its cool embrace.

How quickly hate returns to love, he thought.

As they were about to get into the car, he said, “Annika, about you and Xhafa.”

“Later, my love. I’ll tell you everything.”

BALTASAR CLOSED his phone and went back to his surveillance of the Dementieva woman.

“Everything all right?” he said to Asu.

“They went into the line of pines.” Asu, the driver, put his field glasses down and pointed.

They were in an armored vehicle similar to the one that had brought Arian Xhafa and the Syrian from the air base to the compound. It was still light enough to see the stand of trees. The pines looked delicate in the gathering twilight, like a Japanese watercolor.

“What are our orders?” Yassin said from behind them.

“The woman is to be taken to the safehouse in the western district of Vlorë. The other three are to be killed.”

Baltasar could feel Yassin’s excitement coming off him in waves.

“Now,” he said. “As soon as we determine—”

At that moment, the huge car slid out from behind the trees and headed off to the east.

“Go,” Baltasar said. “Go!”

Asu started up the vehicle and put it into gear. The advantages of the vehicle were many, including its inch-and-a-half-thick armor plate and its two .30 caliber machine guns, mounted fore and aft, its maneuverability over any sort of terrain, and its storehouse of other weaponry, including tear-gas grenades, a handheld rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. On the other hand, it was noisy, relatively slow, and not as maneuverable as a car on normal surfaces. Even so, Baltasar favored it over the other forms of ground transport at the Syrian’s disposal.

The large car ahead had its head- and taillights on, but Baltasar instructed Asu to keep theirs off. They were phenomenally lucky that the 737 had landed at sunset. Now, in the twilight’s uncertain illumination, they could follow without fear of being detected.

The car bumped down country lanes into larger streets and then took the ramp onto the ring road that circumnavigated Vlorë. There was no telling where it was headed, and Baltasar was anxious not to lose sight of it.

Yassin leaned forward, body as tense as a drawn bow. “We should drive them off the road,” he said.

“Wait,” Baltasar said without turning around.

“And then, as they come out of the car, use the flamethrower to incinerate them one by one.”

Now Baltasar turned to him. “And what do you think the others will do while the first one is roasting, sit on their thumbs and wait to be set afire?”

Yassin grinned. “There’s always the thirty caliber. Poum, poum, poum! ”

“All good things come to those who wait, Yassin.” He handed Yassin the specially reconfigured U.S. Army M24 SWS sniper rifle. “Check the magazine and get ready.”

FOR THE first forty-five minutes after the 737 took off from Vlorë, Dennis Paull reviewed what he himself knew about the multiple murders in D.C., beginning with the torture-killing of Billy Warren. He married that with the new information Jack had given him, including the damning evidence against Peter McKinsey from testimony from both Naomi and Chief Detective Heroe. The news that Naomi had been murdered by her partner had shaken him to the core. The very idea of such a thing was so alien he’d had to spend several minutes trying to get his mind around it. He’d been in the intelligence services long enough to have experienced or heard about various kinds of betrayals. All were heinous by their very nature, but this was in a category by itself. If there were, indeed, levels of hell, he hoped to God that McKinsey was inhabiting the lowest.

He took out a pad and pen and began jotting down notes. He also tried to make a perp tree, as they called it at Metro, of all the principals involved in the multiple-murder case. After some long and hard contemplation, plus some overseas calls, he had to admit that Jack’s instinct was right. Middle Bay Bancorp was the nexus point for everything. Henry Holt Carson’s bank, InterPublic, was in the process of buying Middle Bay—its books were even now being vetted by a team of forensic accountants led by John Pawnhill. If Jack was correct, Pawnhill was Mbreti, the American kingpin of Arian Xhafa’s sex trade empire. He thought a moment, then jotted down the name “Dardan Xhafa” with a question mark after it. If Pawnhill was the kingpin, what had Arian’s brother been? Or had he been there to keep an eye on Mbreti? Blood was thicker than water to these people, he knew.