Cody drove the van all the way to Sofia, first on the mountain road, then on the main highway that carved its way through the mountains.
At this hour there was next to no traffic, and these mountainous highways were not patrolled much by the militia, as they were during daylight hours.
Cody and Pete Lund had considered some sort of air transportation once the team made it inside Bulgaria, but this country’s airspace was jealously monitored, and flying low over nine-thousand-foot peaks or hugging the valleys would have been suicidal.
Narda Rykov’s aged VW van chugged with surprising ease along winding mountain passes, passing few vehicles, only an occasional long-distance truck huffing and puffing its way up the passes or riding their gears down.
Hawkeye Hawkins had tried to get a conversation rolling about thirty minutes into the trip.
“Hope you’re not too riled about the big guy here questioning your sincerity, miss,” he drawled from behind with a grinning nod to Rufe.
““Riled?” Narda had frowned. “What does this mean, “riled”?”
“Pardon him, miss,” Caine had oil’ered with his best Englishman’s charm, “the lad’s never learned to speak English. He simply meant that Rufe—we—meant no offense. We appreciate the danger you’ve put yourself in.”
“That’s a fact.” Rufe nodded.
Cody knew what they were doing. Breaking the ice. And, in Hawkeye’s case, flirting a little. Cody had learned long ago that time and place mattered little to the Texan when there were ladies concerned. But they also were breaking the ice for Cody.
Things had to be understood before they reached Sofia and trusted this young woman any further.
The slightest hint of a smile tweaked the corners of the lady’s mouth.
“I am not angry. I understand. You gentlemen are here on very dangerous work, I’m sure. You cannot be blamed for not being overly trusting. I am sorry if I appear… remote.”
“You’re entitled to a case of nerves.” Cody said. “I’m sorry you had to be brought into this.”
“It is not nerves, as you say. either,” she said. “I once knew a man… a boy. We met at a National Freedom Organization meeting. He was a student at the university. We fell in love. The one… time we spent together alone, we drove out of Sofia, along this highway.” She stopped talking and looked away quickly to stare out her side window into the blackness whizzing by beyond. “That was the last time we were together. The secret police learned about him. His roommate at the university was an informer They took him to Darvo. You know Darvo?” she asked Cody.
There was no moistness in her eyes. The quaver in her voice was back under control.
A tough lady, yeah.
“The prison for dissidents. Is he still there?”
“He is dead,” she replied without inflection. “He and some other prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest conditions in the prison. The authorities let them die.
“That,” she told them quietly, “is why I risk my life to help you. I do not know your names; I do not want to know. I only want to help in whatever way I can.”
That was good enough for Cody. He knew then that his initial reading of her had been on the money.
Feelings to the bottom of her heart and soul, yes. And a backbone and resolution of Toledo steel.
He would not allow himself to trust her completely. He trusted no one that far, except his men with whom he had been through too much over the years not to know and trust completely.
He would trust Narda as much as he could. He believed in her.
And something about his reaction to her struck him again, for he saw her simply as the beautiful young woman she was.
When he looked at Narda, he could not help but see the woman a child named Laura might have grown up into if a walking bag of shit named Abdul Kamal had not destroyed that life and all its promise.
“Now that we’re all friends again,” Murphy grumbled, “maybe we better figure out just where the hell—’scuse me, miss—where in Sofia we’re going.”
“We ain’t talking no one-horse town.” Hawkeye nodded.
“If Kamal is in bed with the KGB,” Caine thought aloud, “then drugs have to fit into it somewhere.”
“And that’s always the weakest link.” Cody nodded.
Indeed.
The KGB and the Bulgarian government had been deeply committed to the smuggling of heroin through Bulgaria for years and, if anything, had stepped up activities of late.
The KGB’s participation was partly old-fashioned free enterprise. The drug business in Europe alone netted billions per year, about half of the profits funneled to various private Swiss bank accounts; the other half, officially reported to Moscow, channeled into funding operations like Kamal’s takeover of the embassy in Rome. The drug business was sanctioned by the Kremlin in the belief that widespread drug use destabilized a society, weakening it from within; not a major offensive in the KGB’s silent war of aggression but, they felt, one more body punch in the ongoing, covert assault on the West.
The opportunities presenting themselves could hardly have been denied: Through Bulgaria passed every bit of land-transported goods shipped between the Middle East and Europe, and once the KGB and the Bulgarians had for all practical purposes eliminated all competition from the “private” sector—that is to say, rival drug-dealing organizations like the Corsican mob—the KGB had further cut back on expenses by paying for the drugs not with money but with a commodity even more vital and valuable in the Middle East: Warsaw Fact weapons and ammunition.
It was a simple enough arrangement, and it had been working out just fine for too many years. Guns to the Middle East for drugs from the Middle East.
The valve on the pipeline was Bulgaria, but there was not a thing the CIA had been able to do about it because the connections on the Russians’ side came straight from the top, those running the show insulated by security and the devious systems of bureaucratic check and double-check that stretched all the way back to Moscow and made pinpointing the thing just too damn impossible without a handle.
Except, Cody had been thinking, maybe Kamal was the handle they’d been looking for.
The highway sloped down out of the Vitosha range south of the city and stretched ahead, straight as a ruler, across the expanse of wide-stretching plane, the topography flattening out upon this plateau of fertile farmland.
They passed Cistatii in the darkness, a small village twenty-five kilometers south of Sofia that would soon be stirring to life.
The end of this lull in the chase was at hand; the time it had taken to get from Rome to Sofia without detection, with their weapons and ordnance. The fires would be getting hot again.
If they got lucky—and if the two-plus-two Cody had been adding together in his head did, in fact, add up to four.
“What do you know about the black market in Sofia?” he asked Narda.
“Which one?” she replied. “There is a black market for everything in Bulgaria. But I know my way around—is that how you say it in America?”
“That’s how we say it ” He chuckled, then got dead serious again. “Drugs. Heroin.”
“Oh, there is not much of that thing in Bulgaria,” she said. “There is hashish, but the penalties are severe even for that.”
“Not for use in Bulgaria,” Cody said. “I’m thinking of a pipeline through your country to the rest of the world. The truckers bring it by the ton across the border, up from Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon. Who would do that in Sofia?”
“There are rumors,” she said thoughtfully. “It is said that a man operates with full sanction of the authorities. His name is Charova.”
Caine picked up the conversational ball.
“You think Kamal is linked to Charova?”
“He’d have to be,” Hawkeye put in. “The circle’s got to be a tight one for no one to have busted it before this.”
“Lund’s CIA guys have got to know about Charova if Narda does,” Murphy said.
“And we’re after Kamal,” Caine said, finishing the thought. “Two threads that haven’t been tied together yet, is that it?”
“We visit Charova,” Cody growled. “I think he’ll have an idea where Kamal would light, hot from blowing away a twelve-year-old girl ”
Narda reacted to that as if she had been slapped across the face.
“Twelve-year-old girl?”
“We’re after a man who murdered a child in Rome and a couple of other people along the way.” Cody told her. “Do you know where we can find Charova at this hour?”
“Not at his home, I know that.” she replied. “I have never met him, but he is famous to those. . . outside the law.”
“Famous for what?”
“He is never seen during the day. He works only at night.”
“In his business, he would.”
“He may be at his warehouse. I am told he often is.”
Caine cleared his throat
“Uh, excuse me for asking, miss, but you seem to know an awful lot about these unsavory characters.”
“You think, perhaps, I am a gun moll?” she asked with a smile. “Is that how you say it?”
“A might dated, but something like that.” Hawkeye disarmed the barb with his usual Southern charm. “Not that I could picture a thoroughbred like you running with a pack of vermin like that.”
“I know of these things because we of the National Freedom Organization make it our business to know.” She turned in her seat so that she might address the four of them. “We want to know where they are weak. And much of what they do is conducted under the guise of social mixing at bars and the like, and political gatherings are prohibited. At such places things are discussed. This is how I know.”
“Charova.” Cody brought them back to the point. “Where is his warehouse, Narda? We’ll try for him there first.”
Sofia, city of one million souls, was a sharp contrast to Rome, which had been bustling and noisy, bursting at the seams. Sofia slumbered with enough order, peace, and quiet to make any good Party member proud.
They approached the city from the south, leaving the highway and heading into the orderly grid of deserted streets that criss-crossed broad avenues linked with poplars and broad-crowned chestnut trees. The open-air cafes were closed and boarded up at this late hour.
They crossed the elektrichka tracks over which the commuter trains would soon be humming practically back-to-back in from suburbs of hundreds of identical, drab, modem apartment houses.
They passed an occasional delivery truck on early rounds, a street cleaner, some private vehicles, and twice Cody drove past police vehicles cruising the streets but not interested enough in a rust-bucket van like this one that carried four heavily armed commandos and a member of the NFO.
Narda directed them around Lenin Square, after which they followed Georgi Dimitrov Street, skirting the very old sections of town where the streets were narrow cobblestone, medieval, the stately Byzantine Sancta Sophia basilica poking its floodlit cuppola top toward the dark heavens.
And everywhere—sidewalks that within hours would be overcrowded with pedestrians, thoroughfares that would flood with taxicabs and trucks and bicycles—everything was deserted.
“Like a ghost town” was how Hotkeys put it.
Narda had gone back to sitting straight-backed, staring ahead as they proceeded deeper into the city. She had spoken only to give Cody directions.
“Welcome to the capital of Bulgaria,” she said after a while, and her words were not the cool monotone but tinged with bitterness. “I do not know if you men have ever…” She paused and started again in a different, reflective voice. “It is a terrible thing to hate one’s home.”
The old section of town gave way to what in America would have been called tenements, and then they were approaching the warehouse district, canyons of architectural behemoths; looming shadows above and beyond faint pools of yellow cast by street lamps at every other intersection.
The conversation tapered off to nothing.
Cody felt that icy calm of total awareness slip over him.
They were in the belly of the monster now. Behind enemy lines? Hell, they were on the enemy lines.
All it would take would be one nosy cop, one bored militia patrol looking for something to do, to discover them and blow the whole thing.
If that happened, Abdul Kamal truly would have escaped. Laura Parker and her father would go unavenged. Narda Rykov would go to Darvo Prison and follow the fate of her star-crossed lover.
And Cody and his team would be dead.
If they were lucky.
“Turn here,” Narda said.
Cody tapped the VW’s brakes and steered into a canyon like all the others for the past several blocks, this one swathed in shadow, steam clouds rising from beneath a manhole, giving the scene a hazy, other-worldly ambience.
There were no other vehicles in sight.
“That alley at mid-block,’ Narda said, pointing. “Charova owns both warehouses. He has an office in the one on the right.”
Cody steered the van to the curb opposite the alley that ran between the warehouses. He shut off the van’s headlights but left the engine idling.
Hawkeye was looking up and down the street with the rest of them.
“Plenty field of fire if we need it.”
“Let’s hope we don’t,” Murphy rumbled, checking his weapons, as were the others.
Narda watched them with uneasy eyes.
“You think…the man you want is here, with Charova?”
“I doubt we’ll be quite that lucky, miss,” Caine said with a sigh, “though it would be nice for a change.”
“Narda, do you know what kind of security setup Charova has inside .there?” Cody asked.
“I’m sorry, that is something I do not know.”
“Okay, then we go in prepared to blast our way out if we have to,” Cody told them. “We may find nothing but an empty warehouse. We could find Charova and a couple of his pals. If there are fireworks, we want him alive, remember that.”
“What do you want me to do?” Narda asked.
“Stay out here with your eyes open,” Cody said. “Tap the horn if there’s trouble. We’ll come running if we can. If we don’t and you’re in danger, run for it. Save yourself, Narda.”
“But you—”
“We’re here to take the risks, not you.”
“Uh, maybe one of us oughta stay out here with the lady,” Hawkins drawled amiably.
“And you’re all set to volunteer, right?” Cody grinned. “Not this time, Hawk.”
Narda watched them debark from the van, then slid over to behind the steering wheel.
They fanned out across the street, Cody taking the lead, easing along the wail of the building opposite the deserted loading dock to a partly open metal door set midway in the dark wall.
Hawkeye flattened himself to one side of the wall outside the door. Caine and Murphy took the other side, Uzis held in both hands for instant target acquisition.
Cody stepped in front of the door and kicked, opening it the rest of the way. He plowed through, breaking well clear of the door in case anyone was inside, waiting for him.
Nothing greeted him in there save a garage area scantly illuminated from another half-open door, this one across the ground floor of the warehouse.
The others of the team filed through at his signal.
They went into the office in the same manner.
They found the two men sprawled in slimy slicks of blood upon the floor of the bright, fluorescent-lit office.
One of the men was still alive.
Not the one stretched across the splintered remains of a chair. That one had caught a shot in the heart that had to have rendered instant death, and the blood across him already had begun to congeal.
Cody heard it first: the faintest trace of a wheezing death rattle, sounding at first like no more than a mouse gnawing a chunk of cheese somewhere behind one of the walls.
Caine and Hawkins left the room, taking positions outside the doorway, in the garage.
Murphy and Cody moved around to behind the table. They found the source of the death rattle. Murphy remained standing, his Uzi on the door. Cody knelt beside an oversize man lying on his side on the floor against the wall.
The floor and the wall nearby were smeared and specked with blood, as was most of the dying man’s grossly overweight body.
Cody gently lifted him into a sitting position.
It was a miracle that the guy had survived this long. He had been tortured, obviously, his flabby face streaked from deep knife slices, down to the bone, along either puffy cheek.
“Looks like that guy’s got both feet in the grave,” Rufe noted.
The fat man’s eyelids flickered, eyes blinded with pain, and blood-glazed beyond the realm of consciousness, pink bubbles bursting at the corners of his mouth.
Cody said to him, near an ear, “Charova?”
The man nodded almost imperceptibly and coughed.
The death rattle grew louder, red drool dripping from one corner of the mouth to further strain his rotund, heaving belly.
“C-Charova …” he acknowledged weakly.
Cody knew he had only seconds before he would be talking to a corpse.
“Kamal?”
The man tried to nod again but only coughed, an awful gurgle from down deep. He had been stabbed in the stomach after having been tortured.
“Kamal…” the fading voice repeated. “Vronski… Padomir…”
Cody realized that the full exchange between then had been names. He started to ask “Where?” in Bulgarian, then realized that the fat man had stopped coughing, that the belly had ceased its tremblings.
Charova was dead.
He eased the bulky corpse back to the position in which he had found it and stood, looking away from what was left of what had been their one lead to Abdul Kamal.
Charova had spent his life trafficking in pain and misery and addiction and mean death for others—and hefty profits for himself. The mean way he had died had been justice, as far as Cody was concerned.
“Strikeout?” Murphy asked.
Cody was going over the exchange with Charova in his mind.
“I’m not sure, Rufe.”
Charova. Kamal. Vronski. Padomir. The words between him and Charova.
Names.
Vronski.
That stirred a memory somewhere deep in his subconscious, tickling, for a moment unrecognizable but there.
“Names,” Murphy grunted, surveying the sight of the two dead men. “Charova knew Kamal. You think Kamal did this?”
“Kamal and someone named Vronski.” Then he had it, with an abruptness that made him snap his fingers. “Vronski. Colonel Yuri Vronski. KGB. I crossed tracks with a Colonel Vronski seven years ago in Bonn. He was attached to the Soviet embassy there. I’d heard he got the wrong end of the stick over internal politics and ended up gassing peasants in Afghanistan. Sounds like he’s worked his way back to more refined work, like smuggling heroin and sponsoring guys like Kamal. And this.”
“Padomir,” Murphy said, considering. “You figure that’s a person or a place?”
“Whatever it is, it’s the next link in the chain,” Cody growled.
He started to add, “And the only lead we’ve got—” but he was interrupted by the sounds of Narda Rykov repeatedly, frantically pounding the VW van’s horn from the street outside.