54

Heiliggeistrasse 67, Munich, Germany

September 19, 2009

12:00 p.m.

Sarron entered the crowded bar on the narrow Heiliggeistrasse. Pushing his way roughly through its noisy patrons, he quickly picked out Hagen Kassner’s hard, lean face projecting above the bar counter. It had been some years since he had last seen him, but the man hadn’t changed, still every bit the legionnaire Sarron remembered soldiering with in Africa.

Kassner pointed him to a door at the side of the bar and, taking a bottle of cognac and two glasses from a shelf, followed him through. In the quiet of the private back room, he first saluted and then poured two full glasses of the brandy, passing one to Sarron.

“Vive la mort, vive la guerre, vive le sacré mercenaire,” they toasted in unison, downing the contents of the tumblers in one.

While Kassner quickly refilled the two glasses, his face broke into as much of a smile as it ever permitted itself. “Jean-Phillipe. It’s been a long time. It was good to get your call. I expected you here earlier,” he said, offering Sarron a seat and returning his full glass.

“I took the long way round. I had to avoid Switzerland. Can’t risk border controls at the moment.” Sarron knew well that he could easily have cut three to four hours from his journey by going through Switzerland, but their border checkpoints were the only ones that now remained in the center of Europe. By slipping south through the Mont Blanc tunnel into Italy and losing himself in that fast flow of traffic that continually pounds eastward past Milan and then up through Austria, he could move between countries without risk of scrutiny but at the expense of a much longer journey.

“My friend, there is no need for explanations here. It is only that I was looking forward to remembering some of our old times together. Later, when the bar is closed perhaps?”

Sarron nodded. “Have the others arrived?”

“Yes, this morning. They were here off a private plane, but they had a meeting arranged with some Serbische. Yugo Mafia guys, I think. They said to tell you they were feeling a bit—how did they say it?—‘naked’ and wanted to sort it out before you arrived. They should be back soon. Wait here for them. Enjoy the brandy. I will send in some food. I need to get back to the bar for now.”

“The Englishman?” Sarron asked as Kassner was leaving.

“Nothing so far, although I do have this for you.” Kassner stopped and took a folded piece of paper from a back pocket that he passed to Sarron. “It will get you started. I’ll send the others in when they return.”

“Merci, mon ami,” Sarron said, raising his glass to the tall man.

He opened the fold of paper. It was a printout of the home page for Wunderkammer Graf Antiquitäten, the shop of Bernhard Graf. He first noted the address, Theatinerhof 6, Munich, locating it on a street map of the city hung on the wall. It was not so far away from the bar and he had to fight the urge to go there immediately.

Telling himself to slow down on the brandy and wait for the others, Sarron studied the paper’s photographs of the type of antiques the shop sold. It was instantly obvious that it was an expensive, if strange, antiques store in the very center of what he knew to be an expensive city.

Maybe Quinn had found something linked to Mallory and Irvine. This Graf he was visiting certainly looked like the kind of person that might be interested in such a story. If so, perhaps it really did have enough value to get Sarron back from the brink. He was going to need to play this slow and get the full details before he could deal with Quinn the way he intended.

Half an hour later, the parlor door swung open, and Oleg and Dimitri Vishnevsky came into the room.

Sarron was instantly surprised at their appearance. He hadn’t seen them since they’d fled Nepal eighteen months earlier. Although they always looked fit and strong, the tall blond twins were no longer the scruffy, disheveled mountain bums he knew but now were immaculately dressed in dark designer clothes and well-cut black leather jackets.

“Where have you two been? Robbing Hugo Boss?” Sarron asked, recalling Kassner’s comment.

“No,” they said as a pair.

As each took Sarron’s outstretched hand to shake it, he noticed the expensive gold watches on their wrists.
“You both look well. Richer too. Things must be good.”

“When we returned, we found the new Russia more friendly to a couple of deserters than it might once have been,” Oleg Vishnevsky replied with a hard smile. As he spoke, his brother dropped a hand-tooled, leather Gucci overnight bag onto the table with a heavy thump.

Unzipping it, Dmitri lifted out a bundle of white cloth from which he unwrapped an Uzi submachine gun. “On loan from our Yugo friends here,” he said, passing the weapon to Sarron.

Reaching in again, he produced an AKM rifle with a collapsible stock.

“Qu’il est beau,” Sarron responded as he rapidly stripped the first gun of its magazine, cocked it, and then let the mechanism strike on the empty chamber with a click.

Oleg Vishnevsky sat down and helped himself nonchalantly to a brandy using Kassner’s empty glass. “We are here, Sarron, because you called and because we owe you. You gave us a chance when we were lost, with nothing, and we don’t forget something like that in Russia.”

He drank from the glass and then passed it to Dmitri, who also took a swig before he said, “And because, despite everything we now have, we sometimes miss the Himalayas.”

He raised the glass up as if in a toast to the mountains.

“So what now?” demanded Oleg.

Sarron handed him the piece of paper he had been studying. “I think we should make a start here.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

“Patience, boys. Patience.”