True Faith and Allegiance

62

Luca Gabor smelled fresh dirt, wet air. He had no idea where the hell he was or what the hell was going on, but he did not ask. The confusion that began when he was taken from his prison cell at four in the morning morphed into fear when he was blindfolded, cuffed, and led out of the prison and into the back of a van, and this fear kept him silent even now.

And while he had spoken little to the people in the vehicle around him, they had said nothing back to him.

They’d driven for twenty minutes, then he was transferred to another vehicle. He had the impression he was with a new bunch of captors, but they’d said nothing more than the first group, and they drove him around for another twenty minutes.

Then the vehicle stopped, he was led out, and this is when he smelled nature for the first time.

Now he was pushed onto his knees, and he started to fall forward. As he cried out in surprise he was grabbed from behind and held in a kneeling position.

And then the blindfold was pulled from his eyes, he was released, and he blinked away the sweat of fear. It was dark, but he could tell he was somewhere in the woods, because the headlights of a vehicle behind him lit the scene.

A thick tree line was just twenty meters ahead, but right in front of him, a foot from where he knelt, fresh dirt had been dug, a hole two meters long by a meter and a half wide.

Luca looked inside it.

It was shallow, no more than a foot deep. The body of a man wearing a white shirt and a tie lay faceup. Even though the shadows were thick in the hole, Gabor could see there was a bullet wound in the man’s forehead.

In Romanian he screamed, “Shit! Shit! What is this? What am I doing here?”

From right behind him he heard a man speak. “How’s your English, Luca? I hear it used to be good, back when you worked for Romanian intelligence.”

“I… I speak English. What is going on? Who are you? What do you want? I have done nothing to anyone!”

The person behind him moved even closer now. Just behind his ear. His voice was intimidating in its tone and proximity. “I heard you’re a tough guy. But you whine a lot for a tough guy.”

“I… I want to go back to Jilava. Take me back. Now!”

Instead of an answer, Luca Gabor got a boot in the small of his back. He fell face-first into the hole, right next to, and partially on top of, the dead man. His hands cuffed behind him meant he had trouble scooting back off the body.

A flashlight’s beam centered on the corpse next to him. Gabor squinted away the light, but he looked at the body, crammed up next to him in the small shallow grave. The dead man and Gabor’s face were a foot apart.

“You know this guy?”

“No! No, I swear! I’ve never seen him.”

“His name is… was, Dragomir Vasilescu.”

Luca Gabor looked again, then he squinted into the light. “The director of ARTD. I know the name. I did not know him. But… I swear I had nothing to do with anything he might have—”

“Alexandru Dalca paid you a visit.”

Gabor began shaking his head violently, but he heard the sound of the slide on a semiautomatic pistol being racked.

“Before you answer, asshole, know this. Ol’ Drago there didn’t want to talk to me, either. And you see what that got him.”

Luca changed his tune quickly. He wasn’t going to risk his life to defend Alexandru fucking Dalca. “Yes, It’s true. He wanted me to make a connection for him. To get him out of the country. I didn’t know why. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.”

“I know why he wanted to run.” The voice behind the flashlight said. “I was why he wanted to run. He’s a smart guy, after all. What I don’t know is what you told him. You tell me right now, or you end up next to old Drago here for eternity, or until a dog comes by, smells your stench, and drags you off.”

Luca thought about the three million dollars his daughter received this afternoon. He could give up Dalca’s secret, but he could not lose out on so much money. He said, “I didn’t help. I refused.”

From his right side, he felt the slap of mud being tossed on top of him. A second later he heard the sound of a spade piercing the pile of loose soil there, and then another load of wet dirt came crashing down. This time it landed on his chest.

He was being buried alive.

“I’ll tell you!” he screamed. “I’ll tell you everything!”

Ten minutes later Midas and Jack pulled Luca out of the hole, put the blindfold back over his eyes, and began leading him back to the minivan. They both noted that Luca Gabor had soiled himself somewhere along the process, and they really did not want to drive him anywhere, but a promise had been made. They’d take him back to Romanian intelligence agents waiting in a parking lot in nearby Sinteşti, and the agents would take him back to Jilava Prison. They would probably be pissed that the clean prisoner they’d handed off an hour earlier was being returned to them covered in mud and shit, but the Americans had gotten the intel they needed, and they would apologize for the trouble and the mess.

Mary Pat had moved heaven and earth to make this happen. The moment Clark had called her after the shoot-out with the Chinese, she’d contacted her counterparts at Romanian intelligence and asked them to look into Dalca immediately. She claimed she had proof he was behind the intelligence leaks in the U.S. that had become the biggest story in the world in the last few weeks, and she needed to know everything about the man in minutes, not hours.

She got a call back in under an hour. Dalca’s name had shown up in a database as having visited a prisoner in Jilava just that day, and Romanian intel officers knew the prisoner well. They told Mary Pat she could send someone over to interview the prisoner at her convenience, perhaps early the following week.

Mary Pat replied she could have someone ready to interview him ten minutes after she hung up the phone.

This was at two a.m.

Romanian intelligence agents, knowing just how fucked-up their world would be if it turned out the attacks in America had anything to do with a former colleague of theirs and they did not make him immediately available to the Americans, went personally to Jilava to cut through any red tape involving the local Bureau of Prisons. Prison officials were rousted out of bed, and at first they tried to send the agents away empty-handed, guards even fingered their guns at one point, but cooler heads prevailed, and promises were made to have Gabor returned before sunup.

No one asked the Americans if they’d had anything to do with the gunfire outside Dalca’s apartment earlier in the evening, or the death of three police officers alongside a half-dozen mysterious Asian men in a nearby park.

The answer to this question was clear, but America’s involvement in this international incident would be covered up by a Romanian government desperate to not publicize the fact one or more of its citizens had been involved with ISIS attacks in the U.S.

After Chavez got what he needed out of Luca Gabor, the shot-up white Renault delivered Gabor back to Romanian intelligence, and they left the body of Dragomir Vasilescu in the shallow grave, one more item for the Romanian government to quickly and quietly forget about for its own good.