Green Light (Sam Archer 7) (16 page)

The
Prizraki
and Bashev in particular were specialists at making people
disappear.

This
year, however, the situation had been reversed.

Swallowing a mouthful of whiskey, the strong alcohol slightly
easing the foreign anxiety he was feeling, Bashev looked up at his
lieutenant as he reached the table. Marat took his silence as an
invitation to sit. As he slid into the booth, he pushed his cell
phone across the lacquered table towards his boss, the device
turned so the screen was facing the larger man.

‘
Valentin just messaged me,’ he said in his native tongue,
keeping his voice low. ‘Names and addresses. These are the
people.’

Bashev
paused, his glass halfway to his lips.

Lowering
his drink back to the table he looked down, examining the message
but not touching the phone.

He
studied the list on the screen then glanced up at Marat.

‘
I thought he was gone. He hasn’t been here in over two
weeks.’

‘
Said he’s been laying low, trying to find out who’s behind all
this shit. And he’s done it.’

‘
Who are they?’

‘
Don’t recognise the names. But he said they’re behind the
disappearances.’

‘
How’d he get these?’

‘
I don’t know; he didn’t say. But at last we have something,
boss.’

Bashev
scanned the list for a moment longer. Then he made a
decision.

‘
Go with Ilya, Sivic and Nemkov,’ he said quietly. ‘Call
Valentin and tell him to meet up with you. Take whoever you find at
these places out to Long Island. When you’re on your way, call me
and I’ll meet you out there. We’ll find out if these people are
involved soon enough.’

Marat
nodded, pocketed his cell and rose, heading for three men by the
door. He passed on their orders quickly before they all left the
building.

Watching
the four men depart, Bashev refilled his glass and swallowed,
feeling the alcohol burn his throat and making his temples throb;
whiskey always gave him a headache but he hated vodka, something
he’d always kept quiet about. Glancing around the club, he looked
at the remaining three men who’d stayed with him as security. Three
enforcers; all he had left. The humiliation burnt as strong as the
alcohol.

Cursing
under his breath in his native tongue, Bashev took another mouthful
of whiskey and kept his eyes on the door.

SEVENTEEN

At the
motel outside Scranton the forecourt had been closed off, the SWAT
truck now parked beside two newly-arrived CSI vans, investigators
examining the scene.

Inside
the room Carlos Goya had been renting, the SWAT Sergeant finished
talking with one of the crime scene investigators and then stepped
outside. He paused for a moment as he took a deep cleansing breath
of air; the room wasn’t large and the number of people crowded in
there combined with the lingering chemical smell had made it an
unpleasant place to be.

Standing
by the team’s truck thirty feet away, one of his men saw him
reappear and approached, a cell phone in his hand.

‘
Sir, you’ve got a call,’ he said. ‘It’s a Sergeant in New
York. He’s the one who contacted the Department about the
fugitive.’

Stepping
forward, the SWAT team leader took the phone. ‘Waters.’

‘
This is Sergeant Matt Shepherd, NYPD. I’m co-ordinating the
search for Carlos Goya. Is he there?’

‘
Afraid not, but he was definitely staying here,’ Waters
replied. ‘The clerk confirmed it from your man’s file
photo.’

‘
How long’s he been at the motel?’

‘
Nine days.’

‘
No sign of him now?’

‘
Afraid not, but there’s still a bag here. We’re thinking he
either saw us and split or he’s coming back. We’re going to pull
back and wait in case he does.’

‘
Is there any kind of chemical smell in the
bathroom?’

Waters
paused. ‘How did you know?’

There
was a pause.

‘
Oh Christ.’

‘
You know something we don’t?’

‘
Has anyone swabbed the tub?’

‘
Forensics showed up a few minutes ago. Hold on.’

Walking
forward, Waters worked his way back into the motel room, stepping
past the teams inside and going towards the bathroom, that acrid
smell hanging in the air. An investigator was kneeling by the
bath-tub with a testing kit, having just taken a sample. Swilling a
small glass vial, he looked at the mixture as it turned
pink.

‘
What is it?’ Waters asked, the phone in his hand still
connected to Shepherd in New York. ‘Bleach?’

The man
shook his head, holding up the sample. ‘It’s mostly sodium
hydroxide. Lye.’

‘
You hear that?’ Waters said down the phone.

‘
I did,’
Shepherd said.
‘
You don’t need to pull back and wait,
Sergeant.’

Pause.

‘
He’s not coming back.’

In New
York, the blacked-out 4x4 carrying the four Eastern European Mafia
enforcers was already on its way through South Brooklyn, heading
towards the Bridge into Lower Manhattan. In the front passenger
seat, Marat sent Valentin a message ordering him to meet them at
their first stop then opened the text with the names and addresses
again, burning them into his memory.

Thirty
two years old, he’d been a mid-level guy until a month back when a
sudden lack of personnel meant he’d received a quick promotion to
become Bashev’s right-hand man. Unlike Vladimir he was New York
born and bred, and before his promotion had been carrying out a
variety of tasks, including body-guarding, chauffeuring and
disposing of people, alive or dead. He had his own methods for the
latter but the boss wanted everyone at these residences taken alive
tonight so that’s what was going to happen.

Marat knew what awaited these people when they got to Long
Island. The
Prizraki
were involved in a number of different enterprises; one of
them currently being a housing development company used to launder
money. Right now they had an extremely wealthy client whose home
they were building to his exacting specifications; one of his
requirements had been a large swimming pool, which had been dug out
but not poured with cement yet. Each person on this list would be
tortured for information regarding the whereabouts of the missing
men; then their wrists would be broken and they’d be buried alive
in a coffin laid in the swimming pool’s pit. Cement would be poured
over the top, covering the boxes and any trace of the victims. Four
inches of concrete and nine feet of chlorinated water was enough to
protect from the best sniffer dog on the planet. It was very
effective. The method had been used successfully many times
before.

Nemkov
drove onto the Brooklyn Bridge, the car holding the four mobsters
anonymous amongst a stream of others heading in the same direction.
Hidden by the blacked-out windows, Marat pulled out a suppressed HK
UMP sub-machine gun from under his seat, slotted a thirty round
magazine into the weapon and snapped the working parts forward.
Aside from being fitted with a silencer, the gun was fresh out of
the box and didn’t have so much as a scratch on it, Marat enjoying
the distinct and comforting smell of gun oil. Behind him in the
back seats, Ilya and Sivic followed his cue and pulled out two
other silenced UMPs, the harsh sound of magazines being slotted
into weapons and rounds being loaded filling the car.

As well as keeping their police records immaculately clean and
their fingerprints rubbed down, the
Prizraki
always cycled their weapons,
taking what they wanted from the guns they ran up and down the East
Coast. It was expensive but unlike many other gangs in the city,
none of them had ever been picked up from old ballistics evidence.
To them, it was worth the cost.

No-one
spoke, but then again none of them were the chatty type; each was
keen to finally be able to administer some retribution. After the
events and humiliation of the past few months, it was long overdue.
They also knew if they didn’t find who was behind these
disappearances and stop them, any one of them could be
next.

‘
Where first?’ Nemkov asked as they began to approach the end
of the Bridge.

‘
West 78
^th
Street,’ Marat replied. ‘We take every person at
the residence; women, children, whoever. If anyone resists, shoot
them in the legs, tape them up and get them in the car.’

‘
You said the boss wanted them alive,’ Ilya said.

‘
They’ll survive long enough.’

EIGHTEEN

Exiting
Santiago’s and Goya’s apartment building on the Lower East Side,
Archer walked down the steps to the sidewalk whilst unscrewing the
cap on a small bottle of water. The bleeding from the cuts to his
chest and arm seemed to have stopped but they were still sore and
painful. He popped two painkillers a medic had just given him into
his mouth and swallowed them with a gulp of water, feeling the cold
liquid hit his empty stomach. He hadn’t eaten anything apart from
some prison chow given to him at midday in his cell but whatever
appetite he might have had had been taken away by the sight of what
had been lying in the bath upstairs.

He’d
worked on the street for six years and as a counter terrorist cop
for over three but he’d never encountered anything as disturbing as
the sight of Santiago in that bathroom. It took a special kind of
person to work in CSU but even they’d seemed slightly unsettled by
what they’d found. There’d been no sign of anything unusual in the
apartment when he and Hendricks had first entered, no smashed lamps
or overturned furniture to indicate there’d been any sort of
struggle, just a dead criminal dissolving in the tub.

Piranha solution
, the CSU
investigator had called variations of the concoction.

I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out
why.

Goya and
Santiago were dead, the pair who’d really killed Leann and shot him
and Vargas. He should have been elated but he felt almost the
opposite; it was a surprising anti-climax. Although they were both
gone, their fates didn’t change Vargas’ current situation or his
own prospects, which were looking pretty grim. He also felt
slightly cheated; he’d have liked to have had the opportunity to
reintroduce himself to the two men, especially after what they’d
done to Alice and Leann Casey.

Feeling
the bite of the cold wind as it whipped through his hair, he pulled
his cell phone and dialled a number saved into the Nokia, lifting
it to his ear and looking down the lamp-lit street as it rang.
Behind him, Josh walked out of the building, moving down the steps
to join his partner.

‘
St Luke’s.’

‘
It’s Detective Archer,’ he said.

‘
Hi Sam. We’ve been wondering where you were.’

‘
I was out of Manhattan and didn’t have any service. How’s she
doing?’

‘
Pretty good; sleeping right now. She should be ready to leave
any day. ’

‘
That’s great. We found who did it.’

‘
They’ve been arrested?’

‘
Not quite. They’re dead.’

Pause.

‘
That’s good news. I mean, that you found them.’

‘
I’ll be in touch. When she wakes up, tell her I
called.’

‘
Will do. Take care.’

He ended
the call as Josh joined him on the sidewalk.

‘
How is she?’ he asked.

‘
Better.’ Archer paused. ‘Thanks, by the way.’

‘
For what?’

‘
For looking for me; the whole time I was in there, I was
praying you guys would realise something was wrong.’

‘
Just sorry it took so long. Neither of us could figure out
where the hell you’d gone. Hendricks said you almost didn’t make it
out?’

Archer
nodded. ‘Sounds about right.’

‘
Royston needs to pay for serving you up in there.’

‘
What can I do? He’s a Lieutenant, I’m a detective who punched
him out in front of his people. He holds all the cards.’

As Josh
looked at him, Archer suddenly grinned.

‘
It was almost worth it though.’

Josh
smiled. ‘Try not to mention that in court tomorrow.’

‘
I’ll do my best. Anyway, how’d you find out where I
was?’

‘
Your car was towed from outside Karen Casey’s. We went down
there and she told us you got picked up.’

‘
My car got towed?’

Josh
nodded. ‘Afraid so.’

‘
Goddammit. There goes another hundred bucks.’

He
paused, the two men watching the officers down the street talking
with residents of the building who’d been evacuated from the
building.

‘
How’s Isabel doing by the way?’ he asked Josh.