Hearts and minds. When an experienced and perceptive operator got deep inside the enemy’s way of thinking, it was possible to anticipate their moves. Not to gift-of-prophecy levels of prediction, but accurately enough to provide an edge. Ben was at war, and in warfare, having an edge was everything.
Thanks to Lena, he knew that Dragan was as anxious to prove himself to Zarko Kožul as he was to offload the stolen Bach manuscript. Therefore, Ben could safely anticipate that Kožul would have been Dragan’s very first port of call the instant he stepped on Serbian soil, offering the precious item to his would-be boss in the hopes of winning his favour.
Which led Ben to consider how Kožul might respond to Dragan’s unusual pitch. If he was any kind of businessman, he would have protested and blustered and made a lot of noise about how this wasn’t his marketplace, how am I supposed to flog this piece of crap, yadda yadda, then gone and started making enquiries anyway to find out whether the thing might be worth even just a few bucks. Any gangster worth his salt would have a well-developed network of fences and other criminal handlers through whom all manner of tainted goods could be filtered and converted into nice clean cash. The moment Kožul had possession of the manuscript, he’d be on the phone. Soon afterwards, the word would be spreading to any number of black market connections. It would all have happened fast. A man like Kožul would expect rapid results.
So Ben had decided on the play. He could describe the manuscript accurately enough and — thanks to Nick Hawthorne — had picked up enough scraps of knowledge about its background to be able to pass himself off as expert, at least to the likes of Kožul. If he could talk his way into a meeting masquerading as an interested cash buyer, and if Kožul took the bait, that gave Ben the means to penetrate his defences. Even the thickest armour always had a soft underbelly, if you knew where to look.
Once he was inside, the plan would dissolve into total improvisation. A lot could go wrong. The most obvious of which was that Dragan might be present when Ben turned up at Kožul’s headquarters, or Lena, or both, which would send things instantly south as Ben was recognised. Worst-case scenario, the fight would break out within moments of his arrival. Best case, it was still a hairy and reckless proposition, with many unknown factors of which the quality of his backup was one of the most concerning. He would be walking in there unarmed, which was even less comfort.
But Ben had gone into less favourable situations in his time, and he was still breathing. He’d still be breathing when the dust settled after this one. So he kept telling himself — but the strange feeling of dread that he’d felt at the airport was still there, like a sour taste at the back of his mouth that wouldn’t fade away.
While Ben worked on his game plan, Husein Osmanović was busy assembling enough stacks of cash to pack tightly inside the Samsonite case in place of the heroin and sugar. Nidal went off in search of food and returned with a sack of hamburgers and fries, which the four men consumed in the silence of the warehouse and washed down with Coke. Ben smoked and said nothing to anyone.
Finally, as midnight approached, it was time. Osmanović and his men gathered up their chosen weapons and the four of them walked out into the cold night and piled into the Mercedes, Ben in the front passenger seat with the case at his feet, Nidal and Duša in the back. Osmanović drove across the lit nightscape of Belgrade to a quiet, dirty street a block away from the Rakia nightclub.
Osmanović killed the lights and the engine. The pulsing thump of the dance music could be heard even from here. Ben turned to address the two surly, shadowy faces in the back. ‘Everyone knows the drill. I go first, the rest of you split up and slip inside one at a time. Be ready to act on my signal the moment things kick off. I’ll be relying on you, okay? Let me down, and I swear I’ll shoot you myself.’
The surly faces nodded. Osmanović clapped a hand on Ben’s shoulder. ‘We will not let you down.’
Ben lit a Gauloise. There was a big, empty space behind his right hip where there should have been a fully-loaded Glock nestling in his belt. Feeling naked and unsettled, he grabbed the case, kicked open the car door and began walking towards the nightclub.
As Ben got closer to the Rakia, he craned his neck upwards to see if Kožul’s helicopter was visible on the roof, but the angle was too steep. If they’d had an extra man available, Ben would have posted him on top of the Despot Stefan Tower with a two-way radio to report on any comings and goings. But they were short of manpower as it was.
A street lamp across from the nightclub was flickering. The shadows seemed to contain all kinds of hidden menace. Ben watched the red light spilling out of the Rakia’s main entrance doorway like a fiery glow from the gates of hell. The ear-numbing nightmare primal cacophony coming from inside sounded like hell, too. He didn’t think Johann Sebastian Bach would have approved. Miles Davis would probably have just pulled out a revolver and shot the degenerate responsible. Miles was Ben’s kind of musician that way.
A hundred young males and females thronged around the building, eager to press their way inside past the heavy security. Ben wondered whether all these people really didn’t have anything better to do with themselves. He pushed through the crowd. As he’d expected, a bouncer intercepted him before he reached the door. The guy was seven feet tall and all in black, with a beard like a forest and arms like the steel girders on a battleship. Maybe the demons of hell looked like he did, too. He held up a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt in Ben’s face.
‘Ticket.’ The big man’s voice was about three octaves lower than normal. Genetic freak.
‘This is my ticket,’ Ben said, and showed him the case. ‘I’m here to do business with Zarko Kožul. I’d let me in.’
The big man regarded him with hostility, then ushered him inside with a nod to a pair of other bouncers, just as large, who stepped up and closely flanked Ben as he was led through the wall-shaking noise and flashing lights to a door with a sign that said PRIVATNI. He could have broken their necks without too much effort, but that might spoil the timing of his plan.
Forest-beard opened a door and guided Ben into a small office. ‘Who the fuck wants to see Zarko?’ Even with the closed door muffling the din from outside, the guy still had to shout. His beard quivered when he spoke, as if there were things living inside the tangled mass.
‘The name’s Richter,’ Ben shouted back. ‘Lutz Richter.’ Speaking Serbian with an Austrian accent was hard, but the muted pounding of the music covered up his bad intonation. ‘The word on the street is, your man upstairs has something to sell. I’m buying.’ He pointed at the case.
The word on the street. Why did shady crooks always get the worst lines?
They made Ben open the case and lift out its contents, then frisked him carefully. When they were satisfied that he wasn’t carrying any guns or bombs, they allowed him to cram the money back inside the case and close the lid. ‘Happy?’ he yelled to Forest-beard. ‘Now lead the way, big boy.’
The big guy said something to the others that Ben didn’t hear, then left the room. He was gone five minutes, during which time seven hundred pounds of flesh, very little of which consisted of cerebral matter, stood guard over their charge. Ben contemplated the pros and cons of bashing their heads together to see what was inside. Same bad timing.
Then the beard was back. He nodded to the others and motioned to Ben as if to say, ‘Let’s go.’ Evidently the green light had been given from upstairs.
Point of no return. Whatever was to happen up there, Ben was committed now.
Zarko Kožul’s men led him deeper inside the building. Rounding a corner, Ben realised that the strange vibration he could feel thrumming through the walls and underfoot was coming from a paternoster lift. ‘If I’d known we were going on a fairground ride, I’d have bought candyfloss.’
They got on, which was like boarding a moving tram, only vertically, and a harder task for Ben’s oversized and less-than-nimble escorts than it was for him. Mistime it and you might lose a leg or an arm, or get crushed between the rising platform and the access doorway, but what was that to hard guys like Kožul’s hand-picked gorillas? The wooden platform creaked and groaned on its perpetual loop. There was another platform about ten feet above, and Ben supposed there would be another ten feet below, all daisy-chained together. Round and round, all day long. Serving fresh victims up to Zarko Kožul and bringing down the remains for the gorillas to cart away and bury in a lime pit somewhere.
As they juddered their way up through the floors, Ben was mentally rehearsing what he would say when he found himself face to face with the crime boss. He’d be winging it all the way and everything depended on how he was received. If it turned nasty, he planned on killing Kožul first and then going looking for Dragan Vuković. If it went well, he planned on killing Kožul first and then going looking for Dragan Vuković.
They stepped off the paternoster at the top of the building, into a dingy narrow passage with badly whitewashed walls and old floorboards that were slick and shiny from decades of dirt and grease. Ahead, the passage led past a set of doors, behind one of which Ben presumed was Kožul’s office suite Osmanović had described. The passage was barred by two more very large guards, both armed with tiny Czech-made Skorpion submachine guns that looked like toys in their hands. They halted him and insisted on frisking him a second time.
‘They don’t breed them for smarts where you come from, do they?’ Ben said as they patted him down. ‘You think I magicked up a ballistic missile on the way up here?’
‘He’s clean.’
By now, Osmanović and his guys Nidal and Duša would be inside the nightclub downstairs. Ben pictured them working their way around the sides of the dance crowd, nervously fingering their concealed weapons, psyching themselves up for the action that might start exploding at any time. Perhaps wondering if any of them would leave this place alive tonight. In Osmanović’s case, perhaps not caring that much whether he went down fighting, as long as he could take a hated enemy with him.
The beard juddered. ‘This way.’ At a door, one of the armed guards said, ‘I’ll take that,’ and grabbed the case from Ben’s hand, letting his submachine gun dangle from his shoulder as he clutched the case under his thick arm.
‘Be careful,’ Ben said. ‘There’s more cash inside that case than you’ll ever make.’
The guard wasn’t impressed. He motioned at the door. ‘In there.’
Ben expected the door to lead into Zarko Kožul’s office. Instead, behind it was a tiny, bare room with nothing in it but a wooden chair.
It wasn’t a place for business transactions. It was a makeshift holding cell.
And that was when Ben realised he’d walked into a trap.