Page 68 of The Nameless Ones
Chapter LVI
Frend broke the news about the accounts to Radovan Vuksan over the phone. Frend was very glad that circumstances necessitated his remaining isolated from the Vuksans, because this was not information that he would have cared to deliver in person.
‘What about the bankers?’ said Radovan. ‘Why didn’t they protect us?’
Frend thought it was unlike Radovan to be so naïve, but then, he was distressed. One of the problems with using crooked bankers – or rather, bankers who were more crooked than the norm – was the obvious: their essential dishonesty. They would always buckle under the right kind of pressure. But faced with Interpol on one side, and what might well have looked like a perfectly legal series of transfers to accounts in Serbia on the other, perhaps even the bankers were not entirely to blame in this instance. Frend endeavored to explain as much to Radovan, but he was not in the mood to listen. Frend permitted him to vent for a time before pointing out that he had managed to move some funds to secure accounts: not as much as he would have liked, but sufficient for their needs over the coming months.
‘What needs?’ said Radovan. ‘Bread and water?’
‘The position is not quite so grave as that.’
‘Is that really what you think, Anton? If so, I fear you may not have been paying attention. In fact, my brother may be of a similar opinion when I tell him that his war chest is now empty. He will be looking for someone to blame, and you’re nearer to hand than any banker.’
Frend waited. He was good at waiting. All lawyers were, if only because they charged by the hour.
‘Are you done, Radovan?’ he said, once blessed silence had reigned for a while.
Radovan sighed. ‘Yes, Anton, I am done. I apologize.’
‘There’s no need,’ said Frend. ‘I understand the pressure you’re under.’
For a moment, Radovan was tempted to share with him the fact of Gavrilo Dražeta’s murder. In the past, Frend had acted as a sounding board and source of good counsel, but also as a release valve for Radovan. They were close, he and the lawyer: Frend by name, friend by nature. Yet Radovan was also a good judge of people, and knew that Frend was already scared enough. Informing him that another hunter was closing on the Vuksans might well break him.
‘Work on getting us out of Europe,’ said Radovan. ‘Quickly.’
‘What about Spiridon?’
‘I’ll deal with Spiridon.’
‘What you require will cost money, more than you have to hand.’ Frend did not offer Radovan a loan from his own funds. Even had he that kind of cash, which he did not, its disappearance from his accounts might draw attention later, especially if everything ended badly for the Vuksans. But it was also poor practice: lawyers did not lend money to clients.
‘Don’t worry about the money,’ said Radovan. ‘There are ways.’
Chapter LVII
Most and Louis disposed of the Phantom surveillance drone by dousing it in gasoline and setting it alight in a dumpster. Most then drove Louis to a guesthouse on the outskirts of Lidice, just a short distance northwest of Václav Havel Airport. In June 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, the Germans had razed Lidice and sown the ground with salt. They had also executed every male over the age of fifteen and sent the women and children to Chelmno to be gassed, apart from a handful adjudged physically acceptable enough to be Aryanized. The current village overlooked the site of the original settlement. A line of trees concealed it from the view of those staying at the guesthouse.
No one at the desk asked Louis for identification or payment. An elderly woman showed him to a tiny, spotlessly clean room, and left without offering a word. The earliest direct flight from Prague to Vienna left at 8:15 a.m., and Most had decided that Louis should not spend the intervening hours waiting in an airport lounge. Most thought it unlikely that any connection would be made between the explosion at the casino and the departing American, but in the event of such a misfortune befalling them, it would be best if Louis were somewhere other than a terminal building filled with cameras and armed police.
Louis did not sleep, or even remove his shoes, although in deference to his hosts he placed a towel at the foot of the bed so as not to mark the comforter. The TV in the room did not have a cable or satellite connection and was limited to terrestrial Czech channels. He turned on his iPad and tried using the guesthouse’s internet to check local news reports, but most were in Czech and none mentioned anything about an explosion at a casino. After an hour he heard a knock at his door, and Most’s voice called his name. Louis admitted the big man, who just about managed to fit into the room’s single chair. Most had arranged for the motorcycle to be collected by one of his nephews, and all traces of their presence at the factory to be erased, right down to the tire tracks of the BMW.
‘Well, they have no leads yet, so we weren’t seen,’ said Most. ‘Bilbija’s definitely dead, but it’ll take them a while to gather all the bits of him. Two members of the casino’s staff were injured in the blast, one seriously, but he’ll pull through. The police know it was a drone attack because the guard at the gate caught a glimpse as it passed over. They’ll be looking for fragments in the hope of finding a serial number, but that’s long gone. The explosive was tagged, but it was the only C4 I held from that particular batch, and they won’t be able to trace it back to me. I was saving it for a special occasion.’
C4 usually contained a chemical marker to give it an odor and enable its source to be established. By a strange coincidence, the C4 used to kill Luca Bilbija would subsequently be identified as part of the same batch used to assassinate Nikola Musulin in Belgrade. Such were the vagaries of fortune.
‘What about your contact at the casino?’ said Louis.
‘She’s a smart girl. She destroyed the SIM card and the phone I supplied. She still has her own phone, and she used it to send a couple of emojis to her boyfriend while she was texting me, just in case the police or the Novákovi start asking why she was seen using it. The kids in there all have phones stuck to their hands anyway, so she won’t have been the only one. She’ll be okay.’
‘And you?’
Most grinned.
‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘But you won’t be when you see my bill.’
After some reflection, Louis decided not to fly to Vienna but take another train instead. The high-speed Railjet would get him and his baggage, both legal and illegal, from Prague to Vienna in just over four hours, enabling him to continue holding on to the unused Rohrbaugh pistol along with a Glock sourced for him by Most. While he could have picked up replacement weapons in Vienna, it would have involved reaching out to second-tier contacts, ones with whom he was not personally acquainted. Every such transaction involved a degree of unmasking, and it was unwise to expose himself more than was necessary. Louis booked a first-class ticket for the 8:44 a.m. departure, and Most escorted him into the station at 8:30, but not before first checking the concourse for any signs of unusual security activity, the Czech having an eye for such matters. They parted with a handshake and Louis took his seat on the train, his bags now heavier by the weight of the Glock and fifty additional rounds of ammunition.
Three to go, he thought.