Deadly Crossing (Tom Dugan 2) (14 page)

“I agree, but perhaps you’ve noticed he’s stubborn as hell. If we exclude him, he’s not going to just go away, and I’m concerned he might do something stupid. I figure it’s best to keep him with us for now, where we can keep an eye on him. We’ll leave him ashore in the US.”

“Okay. Is good. I should have known you would be thinking of this,” Borgdanov replied, moving back toward the door to the living room.

“Andrei, one more thing. Thank you for agreeing to Anna’s conditions. This is a difficult situation for her.”

Borgdanov nodded. “I understand, and we will stay outside of her circle. And who knows? This Arsov is a crafty fox I think, and maybe the fox will run out of the circle, and they will need someone to chase him,
da
.”

Christ, I hope not
, thought Dugan.

Chapter Seventeen

Container Ship Kapitan Godina
En route to Jacksonville, Florida

Cassie sat on the mattress, breathing through her mouth, her back resting against the corrugated steel wall of the container. Like her two companions, she was stripped to her bra and panties, and the bare steel was hot on her back. Tanya’s head rested in her lap, and Cassie tried to shift her weight without disturbing the other girl — a low moan signaled the failure of that effort. In an hour or so, the steel would be too hot to lean against, and she’d be faced with the unpleasant choice of sitting upright and bracing herself against the continual slow roll of the ship or lying on the fetid smelly mattress. The first choice was exhausting, the second vomit-inducing. Tanya moaned again, and Cassie mopped the girl’s head with a precious piece of clean cloth torn from her skirt and soaked in water from their dwindling reserve.

“I think she’s hotter, Karina. The fever is getting worse.”

Beside her, Karina stirred and reached out to pat Cassie’s arm. “Tanya will be fine. She is tough. All four of her grandparents survived the Battle of Stalingrad. Survival is in her genes,
da
?”

But her optimism seemed forced, and Cassie sensed the fear behind the words.

Cassie shook her head. “It’s all just so horrible…” Her voice trailed off as she looked around in the dim light of the container.

It had been tolerable enough at first, when their seasickness had finally abated, but then the seas got really bad, and even stretching out on the mattresses gave no relief from the constant movement. Rest seemed impossible, and even when fatigue overcame them and they fell into exhausted sleep, they soon found themselves thrown off onto the hard floor of the container. Cassie remembered Nigel’s tale of sleeping in rough seas by shoving his life jacket under the outer edge of his bunk to form a V-shaped trough along his cabin bulkhead, and they emulated the trick, shoving all three mattresses against the long wall of the container and then elevating the outside edges of the mattresses with the boxes of MREs. They’d slept secure for one night at least, resting in the notch they created, with gravity holding them in place and their backs against the steel wall.

Then the rolling got worse — far worse — and the second night one of the toilet buckets came loose from its lashing and slammed against the far wall of the container, losing its lid to dump its vile contents on the container floor. The girls’ fumbling efforts to re-lash the bucket by flashlight had ended in failure when a huge roll caused Tanya to slip in the mess and go down hard, smashing the flashlight and cutting her hand on the broken lens. The girls had groped their way back to their mattresses, to huddle in the pitching dark, listening as one by one, other buckets and water bottles broke free to careen through the container.

Gradually the seas abated, and when dawn began to leak through the small holes near the top of the container, daylight found them clinging to their little mattress islands, awash in a half inch of unspeakable filth that sloshed back and forth with the roll of the ship. Over half their thin-walled plastic water jugs had burst and added their contents to the stew of vomit and body wastes disgorged from the toilet buckets, and the intact bottles rolled around in the filth, as the mattresses and the cardboard of the MRE boxes wicked up the sewage.

Karina had taken charge, wading through the sloshing filth to pull undamaged bottles of water onto her mattress. Then she’d retrieved the three empty and unused toilet buckets that hadn’t broken free and brought them to the mattresses. She’d ordered everyone out of their clothes and sealed the relatively clean garments in one of the buckets, retaining her own dress, which she immediately began tearing into rags. Then she used one of the rags to wipe an intact water bottle as clean as possible before she opened it. While Cassie and Tanya held the other unopened jugs out off the mattresses, Karina sacrificed water from her open jug to frugally, but thoroughly, flush the exterior of the other bottles.

When she’d flushed the bottles, she had the other girls dry them with rags and resecure them in the wall rack, while she dug the MREs from the wet cardboard boxes and pushed all the sodden packing material to one side. Finally, she’d flushed the exterior of all the food packages, dried them, and packed and sealed them in the remaining two clean buckets. At last all three girls braved the ankle-deep mess one last time to stack the three mattresses on top of each other and crawl on top of the stack, discarding their sodden shoes and sacrificing another bit of precious water to rinse their feet.

They’d survived since crammed on their tiny mattress island, hoping against hope the rough seas would not return and destroy what they’d managed to salvage. The remaining food and water was lashed to the near wall within easy reach, along with a single toilet bucket. The bottom mattress had wicked up much of the effluvia from the floor of the container, leaving a slick sheen through which ever-smaller waves rippled with the roll of the ship. The second mattress was sodden as well, as it wicked up fluid from the bottom mattress and the remaining liquid from the top mattress drained into it. Only their small sanctuary was dry, but the mattresses seemed to concentrate the smell.

The discomfort of the hot steel on Cassie’s back returned her to the present, and she shifted again. Tanya moaned in her sleep, moving her right hand as she did so. She cried out and came half awake. Cassie held her tight.

“Shhh… Tanya. It’s okay. I have you. Go back to sleep. Rest is good for you,” Cassie whispered, and Tanya whimpered and closed her eyes again.

When Tanya’s breathing indicated she’d fallen back into a troubled sleep, Cassie studied Tanya’s right hand in the dim light. It was swollen to almost twice its normal size, the skin stretched tight and shiny. The edges of the cut from the flashlight lens were red and angry, and the discoloration had begun to creep up her arm.

“It’s getting worse, Karina,” Cassie whispered.

“
Da
,” Karina agreed. “No doubt some shit got into the cut. There is nothing we can do now but try to keep her comfortable and hope the ship arrives somewhere soon. I think is good thing she sleeps.”

“Wh-what if we don’t get there before… before… you know…”

“We will, Cassie,” Karina said through clenched teeth. “We will all survive. It is the way we will beat these bastards,
da
?”

Holding Warehouse
516 Copeland Road
Southwark, London, UK

“… and you haven’t seen him at all?” Arsov asked into the phone.

“
Nyet
,” said the voice, “not since we were released. We dropped him at Club
Pyatnitsa
. He said he was going to check a few things there and then go home to sleep.”

“Okay. If you hear from him, tell him to call me.”

“
Da
,” the man responded and hung up.

Arsov laid the phone down and drummed his fingers on the battered desk. Where the hell was Nazarov? He hadn’t showed up back at the club, and no one had heard from him for a full day. What was the idiot up to now? He wasn’t in police custody — his informant had been sure about that — but he was nowhere to be found. Had Karina’s uncle and that other ex-
Spetsnaz
asshole grabbed him? It seemed unlikely, but that was really the only explanation.

What were the possible implications? He wasn’t worried that Nazarov would talk — no one was more aware of what the
Bratstvo
did to informers than other members of the
Bratstvo
. No, Nazarov would keep quiet even if it killed him. Arsov smiled — and it probably had. And what could be more perfect? He was on track to resume operations in a week or ten days, and Nazarov was no longer here to defend himself. His narrative was complete. He had come here from Prague and discovered irregularities. Nazarov was not only skimming money into an offshore account, but was also playing both ends against the middle as a paid police informant. The treacherous bastard had set up a massive police raid, and when he, Arsov, had discovered the offshore account and foiled the raid, Nazarov had disappeared.

Arsov hummed a little tune and considered his next move. He still needed to set up one of his other underlings as Nazarov’s accomplice, but that could wait. In fact, hinting to St. Petersburg that he was still struggling valiantly to root out all the problems would make him seem even more indispensable.

He picked up his phone and speed-dialed St. Petersburg.

Specialist Crimes Directorate 9 (SCD9)
Human Exploitation/Organized Crime
Victoria Block, New Scotland Yard
Boadway
London, UK

Detective Constable Cecil Peterson sat at his desk, mouse in hand. He liked his desk position in the bullpen, with his back to the far wall and with the others able to see only the back of his monitor. He could pass his time playing computer solitaire without anyone sneaking up on him, and he had a good view of the whole squad room as well. He liked the late night shift too, without so many prying eyes. Not that he’d had any choice in the matter. No one else wanted it, and it had been ‘offered’ to him on a take-it-or-leave-it basis when they ‘reinvented’ his unit. They’d acted like he should bow down and kiss their bloody arses for the right to stay on a few more years until his full pension kicked in, rather than being sacked or pensioned off early at reduced pay like the rest of his mates.

Twenty-five years in Vice and that’s what he got as a thank you. Twenty-five years of having Barbara’s snooty family say things like, “Oh yes, Cecil’s with the Met, but he’s not a proper copper, is he? He’s in Vice, you know, mucking about arresting whores and breaking up poker games. I don’t see why he doesn’t request a transfer to a real unit, but he seems to like it.”

If only they knew. It wasn’t like that at first — new men joined the unit intent on making a difference. But then they learned they couldn’t, because no one really wanted things to change, did they? If they cracked down on prostitution, there were the inevitable campaigns ranting about the focus on ‘victimless crime’ while ‘real’ crimes went unsolved. And when they eased off, there were the equally strident news stories of the Vice cops ‘allowing’ pimps and other low-life scum to victimize innocent girls.’ Damned if you did, damned if you didn’t.

But you didn’t know that at first, did you? And by the time you wised up a few years in, you were irrevocably tainted. Other departments shied away from accepting transfers from Vice, so you stuck it out and grew more cynical year after year. So what if a few of the lads took a few quid here or did a favor there? It’s not like any of it made a difference. Everyone just wanted to eke it out to full pension, and crawl out of the cesspool. And then along comes Detective Inspector Colin bloody McKinnon, with his high and mighty attitude and new names, sacking good lads left and right. Peterson sneered. Specialist Crimes Directorate 9 — Unit SCD9. It sounded like something in a damned James Bond movie.

He straightened at his desk as the object of his ire walked out of his office and into the squad room, trailed by the redheaded bitch from MI5. What the hell were they doing here at this hour? They both had on tactical vests and were armed, and as he watched, they hurried across the nearly deserted squad room and into the corridor. Through the open door, Peterson heard the chime as the lift arrived.

Peterson’s mind raced. The MI5 bitch had been part of the big operation against the Russians, so it didn’t take a genius to figure out something was up. He closed his game of solitaire and accessed the department server to check new warrants. And there it was — a search warrant for 516 Copeland Road, Southwark, filed less than thirty minutes earlier. McKinnon, you sneaky bastard.

This was bad. The money from Arsov was good, but penalties for failure didn’t bear thinking about. If the Russkies went down to a raid and he hadn’t at least tried to warn them, he doubted he’d survive the week. And they wouldn’t stop with him — Barbara and the kids would be at risk too. But what the hell was McKinnon’s game? He obviously wasn’t planning on raiding Arsov with just himself and the woman, and he hadn’t used any SCD9 assets. And giving Arsov sketchy information was almost as likely to incur his wrath as giving him none. He needed to find out more, and fast.

He stood up and stretched. “Christ, I’m knackered,” he said to his nearest colleague a few desks away. “I’m going out for a smoke. Cover my phone for me while I’m gone, would you, mate? I’ll be back straightaway.”

The man shrugged. “Sure. Take your time. I doubt anything exciting is likely to happen anytime soon.”

Peterson smiled and tried to appear nonchalant as he walked toward the door.
If you only knew mate
, he thought.

Once in the corridor, he raced straight to the stairwell and flew down the two flights to the ground floor. He cracked open the stairwell door and confirmed the corridor was empty before exiting and walking toward the car park at the back of the building. He slowed as he neared the glass door and exited quietly, ducking down behind the nearest patrol car to scan the car park. He spotted them in the far corner.

Bloody Hell! He spotted McKinnon’s car parked behind a ‘Trojan,’ one of the ARVs, or Armed Response Vehicles, of Unit CO19. McKinnon and the Walsh woman were standing near his car, and McKinnon was obviously introducing the woman to a group of black-clad Specialist Firearms Officers. They were all well-equipped and all wearing tactical vests. Peterson spotted assault rifles, and at least one had night-vision glasses hanging from his web gear — likely they all did. This was bad!

Peterson slipped back through the door and raced down the corridor to the toilet. He did a quick check of the stalls to ensure he was alone and then pulled the burner phone from his pocket.