Tadeusz stepped away from the car and began to prowl the boatyard, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Krasic was right in one sense. There was no need for him to involve himself directly in any aspect of his business. But nothing was to be taken for granted just now. His mindset had been shaped by his grandmother, who, in spite of the noble blood she insisted flowed in her veins, had been as superstitious as any of the peasants shed so despised. But shed dressed up her irrational convictions in the fancy clothes of literary allusion. So, rather than teach the boy that troubles come in threes, shed enlisted Shakespeares adage that When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
Katerinas death should have been sorrow enough. Tadeusz prided himself on never allowing his face to give him away, either in business or in personal relationships. But that news had transformed his face into a howling mask of grief, tears flooding his eyes as a silent scream tore through him. Hed always known hed loved her; he just hadnt grasped how much.
What made it worse was that it had been so ridiculous. So very Katerina. Shed been driving her Mercedes SLK with the top down. Shed just left the Berlin ring road at the Kudamm exit, so shed probably still been going too fast when a motorbike shot out from a side street in front of her. Desperate to avoid hitting the careless rider, shed swerved towards the pavement, lost control of the powerful roadster and careered into a newspaper kiosk. Shed died in the arms of a paramedic, her head injuries too appalling to comprehend.
The biker was long gone, unaware of the carnage hed left in his wake. And mechanical examination had discovered a fault in the circuit that controlled the anti-lock braking in the Merc. That, at any rate, was the official version.
But once his initial grief had receded to the point where he could function again, Tadeusz had begun to wonder. Krasic, ever the loyal lieutenant, had reported that in Tadeuszs temporary absence there had been a couple of more or less subtle attempts to move in on his business. Krasic, who had stoically refused to be distracted by his bosss bereavement, had dealt ruthlessly with the threats, but as soon as Tadeusz showed signs of life again, he had laid out the full story before him.
Now, the word was out. Tadeusz wanted the biker. The police officers on his payroll had been little help; information from witnesses was scant. It had all happened so fast. It had just started to rain, so passing pedestrians had their heads down against the weather. There were no surveillance cameras in the immediate area.
The private investigator Tadeusz had hired to re-interview the witnesses had come up with a little more. One teenage boy had been enough of a wannabe rider himself to have noticed that the machine was a BMW. Now, Tadeusz was waiting impatiently for his police contacts to provide a list of possible candidates. One way or another, whether her death had been an accident or a more cruel design, someone was going to pay for it.
While he waited, Tadeusz knew he had to keep himself occupied. Usually, he left the planning on the ground to Krasic and the competent cadre of organizers theyd built around them over the years. He dealt in the big picture and the details were not his concern. But he was edgy. There were threats out there in the shadows, and it was time to make sure that all the links in the chain were still as sound as they had been when the systems were set up.
And it did no harm now and again to remind the peons who was in charge.
He walked over to the waters edge, gazing down the river. He could just make out the leading lights of a huge Rhineship, the grumble of its engine drifting across the water. As he watched, the barge angled into the narrow, deep channel that would bring it alongside the boatyard wharf. Behind him, Tadeusz heard the gates opening again.
He turned to see a battered van drive in. The van cut away to one side, over by the Mercedes. Moments later, he heard the electronic beep of a reversing warning. A large container lorry backed into the boatyard. Three men jumped out of the van. Two made their way towards the wharf, while the third, dressed in the uniform of a Romanian customs officer, headed for the back of the truck, where he was joined by the truck driver. Between them, they removed the customs seal from the container, unfastened the locks and let the doors swing open.
Inside the container were stacked cases of canned cherries. Tadeusz curled his lip at the sight. Who in their right mind would contemplate eating Romanian canned cherries, never mind importing them by the truckload? As he looked on, the customs man and the driver started to unload the boxes. Meanwhile, behind him, the barge glided up to the wharf, where the two men expertly helped it moor.
Swiftly, a narrow passage between the cardboard boxes appeared. There was a moments pause then, suddenly, bodies surged through the gap and leapt to the ground. Bewildered Chinese faces gleamed sweating in the dim lights that glowed from vehicles and the barge. The stream of humanity slowed, then stopped. Around forty Chinese men huddled tight together, bundles and backpacks clutched to their chests, their frightened eyes flickering to and fro across the alien boatyard like horses who smell the taint of blood. They were shivering in the sudden cold, their thin clothes no protection against the chill of the river air. Their uneasy silence was more unsettling than any amount of chatter could have been.
A whisper of a breeze gusted a waft of stale air from the back of the lorry towards Tadeusz. His nose wrinkled in distaste at the mingled smells of sweat, urine, and shit, all overlaid with a faint chemical tang. Youd have to be desperate to choose this way to travel. It was a desperation that had made a significant contribution to his personal wealth, and he had a certain grudging respect for those with courage enough to take the path to freedom he offered.
Swiftly, the truck driver, the two men from the van and the barge crew organized their cargo. A couple of the Chinese spoke enough German to act as interpreters and the illegals were readily pressed into service. First they emptied the truck of its cherries and chemical toilets, then hosed down the interior. Once it was clean, they formed a human chain and transferred boxes of canned fruit from a container on the barge to the lorry. Finally, the Chinese climbed aboard the barge and, without any apparent reluctance, made their way into the now empty container. Tadeuszs crew built a single layer of boxes between the illegals and the container doors, then the customs official affixed seals identical to the ones hed removed earlier.
It was a smooth operation, Tadeusz noted with a certain amount of pride. The Chinese had come into Budapest on tourist visas. Theyd been met by one of Krasics men and taken to a warehouse where theyd been moved into the container lorry. A couple of days before, the barge had been loaded under the eyes of customs officials near Bucharest with an entirely legal cargo. Here, in the middle of nowhere, theyd rendezvoused and been swapped. The barge would take far longer than the lorry to reach Rotterdam, but it was much less likely to be searched, given its documentation and customs seals. Any nosy official with serious doubts could be referred to the local customs who had supervised the loading. And the lorry, which was far more likely to be stopped and searched, would continue to its destination with an unimpeachable cargo. If anyone had seen anything suspicious enough at the airport or the warehouse to alert the authorities, all they would find would be a truckload of canned cherries. If officials noted the Hungarian customs seals had been interfered with, the driver could easily shrug it off as vandalism or an attempt at theft.
As the customs official crossed back to the truck, Tadeusz intercepted him. A moment, please. Where is the parcel for Berlin?
Krasic frowned. Hed almost begun to think that his boss had had sensible second thoughts about the Chinese heroin the illegals had brought with them to pay part of their passage. There was no reason for Tadzio to change the systems that Krasic had so punctiliously set up. No reason other than the foolish superstitions hed been prey to since Katerinas death.
The customs man shrugged. Better ask the driver, he said with a nervous grin. Hed never seen the big boss before, and it was a privilege he could well have done without. Krasics ruthlessness in Tadeuszs name was a legend among the corrupt of Central Europe.
Tadeusz cocked an eyebrow at the driver.
I keep it in the casing of my CB radio, the driver said. He led Tadeusz round to the lorry cab and pulled the radio free of its housing. It left a gap large enough to hold four sealed cakes of compressed brown powder.
Thank you, Tadeusz said. Theres no need for you to be troubled with that on this trip. He reached inside and extracted the packages. Youll still get your money, of course.
Krasic watched, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He couldnt remember the last time hed crossed a frontier with so much as a joint of cannabis. Driving across Europe with four kilos of heroin seemed like insanity. His boss might be suffering from a death wish, but Krasic didnt want to join the party. Muttering a prayer to the Virgin, he followed Tadeusz back to the limo.
2
Carol Jordan grinned into the mirror in the womens toilet and punched the air in a silent cheer. She couldnt have had a better interview if shed scripted it herself. Shed known her stuff, and shed been asked the kind of questions that let her show it. The panel two men and a woman had nodded and smiled approval more often than she could have hoped for in her wildest dreams.
Shed worked for this afternoon for two years. Shed moved from her job running the CID in the Seaford division of East Yorkshire Police back to the Met so shed be best placed to step sideways into the elite corps of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, NCIS. Shed taken every available course on criminal intelligence analysis, sacrificing most of her off-duty time to background reading and research. Shed even used a week of her annual leave working as an intern with a private software company in Canada that specialized in crime linkage computer programs. Carol didnt mind that her social life was minimal; she loved what she was doing and shed disciplined herself not to want more. She reckoned there couldnt be a detective chief inspector anywhere in the country who had a better grasp of the subject. And now she was ready for the move.
Her references, she knew, would have been impeccable. Her former chief constable, John Brandon, had been urging her for a long time to move away from the sharp end of policing into the strategic area of intelligence and analysis. Initially, she had resisted, because although her early forays into the area had given her a significantly enhanced professional reputation, theyd left her emotions in confusion, her self-esteem at an all-time low. Just thinking about it now wiped the grin from her face. She gazed into her serious blue eyes and wondered how long it would be before she could think about Tony Hill without the accompanying feeling of emptiness in her stomach.
Shed been instrumental in bringing two serial killers to justice. But the unique alliance shed formed with Tony, a psychological profiler with more than enough twists in his own psyche to confound the most devious of minds, had breached all the personal defences shed constructed over a dozen years as a police officer. Shed made the cardinal error of letting herself love someone who couldnt let himself love her.
His decision to quit the front line of profiling and retreat to academic life had felt like a liberation for Carol. At last she was free to follow her talent and her desire and focus on the kind of work she was best suited to without the distraction of Tonys presence.
Except that he was always present, his voice in her head, his way of looking at the world shaping her thoughts.
Carol ran a frustrated hand through her shaggy blonde hair. Fuck it, she said out loud. This is my world now, Tony.
She raked around in her bag and found her lipstick. She did a quick repair job then smiled at her reflection again, this time with more than a hint of defiance. The interview panel had asked her to return in an hour for their verdict. She decided to head down to the first-floor canteen and have the lunch shed been too nervous to manage earlier.
She walked out of the toilet with a bounce in her stride. Ahead of her, further down the corridor, the lift pinged. The doors slid open and a tall man in dress uniform stepped out and turned to his right without looking in her direction. Carol slowed down, recognizing Commander Paul Bishop. She wondered what he was doing here at NCIS. The last shed heard, hed been seconded to a Home Office policy unit. After the dramatic, anarchic and embarrassing debut of the National Offender Profiling Task Force that hed headed up, no one in authority wanted Bishop in a post anywhere near the public eye. To her astonishment, Bishop walked straight into the interview room shed left ten minutes before.
What the hell was going on? Why were they talking to Bishop about her? He had never been her commanding officer. Shed resisted a transfer to the nascent profiling task force, principally because it was Tonys personal fiefdom and she had wanted to avoid working closely with him for a second time. But in spite of her best intentions, shed been sucked into an investigation that should never have needed to happen, and in the process had broken rules and crossed boundaries that she didnt want to think too closely about. She certainly didnt want the interviewers who were considering her for a senior analysts post to be confronted by Paul Bishops dissection of her past conduct. Hed never liked her, and as Carol had been the most senior officer involved in the capture of Britains highest profile serial killer, hed reserved most of his anger about the maverick operation for her.
She supposed shed have done the same in his shoes. But that didnt make her feel any happier with the notion that Paul Bishop had just walked into the room where her future was being decided. All of a sudden, Carol had lost her appetite.
We were right. Shes perfect, Morgan said, tapping his pencil end to end on his pad, a measured gesture that emphasized the status he believed he held among his fellow officers.
Thorson frowned. She was all too aware of how many things could go wrong when unfathomable emotions were dragged into play in an operation. What makes you think shes got what it takes?
Morgan shrugged. We wont know for sure till we see her in action. But Im telling you, we couldnt have found a better match if wed gone looking. He pushed his shirtsleeves up over his muscular forearms in a businesslike way.
There was a knock at the door. Surtees got up and opened it to admit Commander Paul Bishop. His colleagues didnt even glance up from their intense discussion.
Just as well. Wed have looked bloody stupid if wed come this far and then had to admit we didnt have a credible operative. But its still very dangerous, Thorson said.