Chapter 32
Croatia
A
nton Scuric gave the shorter of the two Bosnian harlots a healthy smack to the back of her skinny neck to keep her in line. He never should have cut the stupid women loose, but he couldn’t afford for merchandise to drown if they fell out of the boat. And his reward for being nice was that one of the bitches kept trying to run away—that after he’d bought their passage from their pitiful peasant lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On top of that, he’d spent the money to feed and house them while they were on their way to new jobs with nice men in Rome.
No good deed goes unpunished
, he thought to himself as he shoved the boohooing girls down the wooden planking and into the bobbing inflatable. They cursed and cried as if he’d thrown them off a cliff—which is what he felt like doing. Neither could likely swim, so they cowered in the bow of the dinghy instead of trying to escape. It would be easy from here.
Still standing on the weathered dock, Scuric lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. He was used to the thrill of a good operation—smuggling was his life and the excitement of it was a draw equal to the money. But his recent business with the Chinese had set him on edge. Watching them go, he couldn’t help but feel as if he’d been exposed to some deadly plague. He didn’t mind that they’d killed their girls. He’d been well paid, more than he’d have gotten for the little whores anyway—but the smaller man, the one called Ehmet, had looked at Scuric as if he would have been happy to kill him as well, just for the fun of it.
Shuddering, the Croatian stepped into the boat and cursed at the girls, ordering them to cast off the bow line. The tall one just glared at him. He threatened to cut their heads off and the little one yanked the rope free, nearly falling out of the boat in the process. Both women began to sob, clutching each other and glancing up at Scuric as if he might actually follow through on his threat. He was beginning to wish he’d let the Chinese monsters have these girls as well. It would have been a monetary loss, but at least he could be home having a beer and watching soccer instead of taking another trip up the coast to Sibenik to drop off the goods.
Scuric did his best to ignore the wailing women, turning on his seat to give the motor a yank. It roared to life on the second pull. He settled back on the ice chest and gave the throttle a little twist to nose the boat out toward his gullet. Maybe he’d even treat himself to a round or two with the merchandise to calm his nerves. The tall one had a face like a squirrel, but the little one had potential.
A moment later, the motor coughed, then went silent, leaving the dinghy bobbing in the water just feet from the dock.
Cursing to himself, Scuric turned to give the motor another pull. Nothing. He checked the choke lever, then glanced at the fuel line. It looked okay, but he tugged anyway and was relieved to see the connector had slipped loose. An easy fix—
A frantic yell from the shore jerked his attention back toward the van. A woman with dark hair stood beside the driver’s door, waving her arms. Pavol was nowhere to be seen. A chill ran up his spine when he saw that she looked Asian, bringing back the horrible recollection of the Chinese monsters.
A burble in the water, like a fish feeding off the surface, drew his attention back to the boat. The inflatable gave a little rock, as if it had been hit by the wake of a passing ship. Scuric grabbed the running line along the pontoon to steady himself. A fleeting notion that something wasn’t right hit him at the same moment something pierced the rubber floor at his feet. There was a loud zipping sound as the floor yawned open like a gaping black mouth. He saw only a shadow in the water, then a hand shot up from the depths followed by the cruelest face Scuric had ever seen.
Screaming in abject terror, the Croatian pedaled backwards, hands flung forward to fend off this smiling demon from the deep. The wet hand snatched him by the ankle and yanked him downward, pulling him beneath the surface in mid scream.
Above, two terrified women huddled at the bow of the boat, staring into the black water where the floor used to be. Absent Scuric’s cursing, there was no sound but the wind and lapping waves.
Quinn had come up for air alongside the dinghy as soon as he felt Scuric take his seat on the ice chest. When the Croatian put the boat in gear and headed away from the dock, Quinn had simply let his body trail, hanging on for the short ride with little more than his nose above water. Turning away from the dock, the extra drag was hardly noticeable in a small inflatable loaded down with three people. Quinn had ducked under the surface the moment the engine died and hovered under the rear of the little boat, just forward of the transom, giving Song time to do her job.
There was plenty of light in the clear water and Quinn could easily make out the indentations of Scuric’s feet on the inflatable floor when he braced himself to give the motor another pull. Quinn counted to five before driving the Riot’s thick tonto blade up through the rubber floor and drawing it around in a quick, sweeping arc just forward of where Scuric sat. The Croatian’s weight did most of the work opening up the hole as Quinn swam up and grabbed him around both ankles. Filling his lungs with air while Scuric shrieked out his last bit of oxygen, Quinn dragged the surprised smuggler beneath the surface, trapping the man’s arms against his sides as he swam toward the sandy ocean floor, ten feet below.
Scuric’s scream trailed upward in a silver cloud of bubbles with the last of his breath. Quinn couldn’t help but smile to himself. The idiot probably still hadn’t realized that it was a human being that had him and not some mermaid seeking revenge for all the women he’d sold into slavery.
Driving downward with slow, steady kicks, Quinn held Scuric’s face against the rocky bottom until he ceased to struggle, then another half minute for good measure. When he felt sure the Croatian was still revivable but beyond fighting, Quinn swam behind him and grabbed him around the neck in a less friendly version of a rescue tow. Snatching the pistol from Scuric’s belt, he kicked his way upward.
He could hear the girls screaming before he even reached the surface. Still cowering in the front of the gutted dinghy, they calmed immediately when they saw their tormentor in a headlock. Any enemy of Scuric’s was likely an ally. Quinn dragged the sputtering Croatian onto the rocks and turned him on his side so he could vomit out the seawater he’d gulped in his panic. Quinn wiped the water off his face and motioned the girls to come out of the boat with a nod of his head.
“You speak English?” he asked.
The shorter of the two gave him a hesitating nod. “Some little.” She looked at the pistol but her eyes played along the myriad of bullet and blade scars that covered his torso, sizing him up.
“What’s your name?” Quinn said, stuffing the gun in his waistband to get it out of sight and free up his hands to deal with Scuric. Water streamed from his jeans, making a pool on the white rocks at his feet.
“Belma,” the girl said.
“Okay, Belma,” Quinn said, stooping to take a look at Scuric’s wallet. A quick count showed it fat with a few waterlogged Croatian kuna and nearly 5,000 euros in large bills. “Can you find your way back home?”
She nodded at Scuric. “He take . . . passport.”
Of course
, Quinn thought. It was a common practice for human traffickers and pimps to hold a woman’s passport to keep her in check. A quick search of Scuric’s front pocket found the documents safe in a plastic bag. As Quinn suspected, the girls were from Bosnia, caught up in a prostitution scheme when they’d been promised jobs as nannies or housekeepers.
Song jogged down the concrete dock as Quinn handed the passports back to the girls, along with the wad of wet money from Scuric’s wallet.
“Don’t trust men like this anymore,” he said. “Now take this and go.”
Belma’s deep green eyes flew wide when she saw the bills. “Home?” she stammered, unsure of what he meant. “Yes? I go home?”
“Yes, you can go home,” Quinn said. He looked up at Song. “The driver?”
She nodded, leaving the man’s fate to Quinn’s imagination. “They may take the van. The keys are in the ignition.”
Quinn instructed the girls to drive only to the nearest bus station where they should ditch the van and take a bus back into Bosnia. Still stunned from their brush with the cruelest of futures, they shuffled away quickly, jumping into the van and spraying gravel as they sought to put the whole episode behind them.
Quinn dragged Scuric into the thick foliage just up from the jetty and out of sight from anyone on the anchored
Perunika
. He press-checked the chamber of the pistol and released the magazine to make certain that it was full. The Hrvatski Samorkres HS2000 handgun was sold under license to Springfield Armory in the United States as an XD or X-treme Duty Pistol. Scuric’s gun was an XDS, meant for concealment rather than as a primary battle weapon. The subcompact single-stack carried only six rounds of .45 ACP ammunition, including the one in the chamber. Quinn found a second magazine in the same pocket where Scuric had kept the girls’ passports. Song had taken an identical pistol from the van driver and now pointed it at Scuric as she squatted beside his shoulder opposite Quinn.
“The Fengs,” Song hissed. “Where are they?”
“Why?” Scuric wagged his head, gaining some of his swagger back after the underwater ordeal. “Did one of them run off and leave you at the altar?”
Quinn planted his palm straight down against the man’s nose, bringing a sputtering string of curses. Quinn snapped his fingers above the man’s face. “Listen up,” he said. “Are the Fengs on the boat?”
Scuric blinked, his eyes watering from the blow. “You are both dead.”
Quinn gave a chuckling shrug. “You aren’t doing much to convince me to keep you alive.”
“Quickly,” Song snapped, sending a hammer fist into the man’s unprotected groin. “Are the Fengs on the boat?”
Scuric drew himself into a ball and moaned. He shook his head. “Gone . . .”
Quinn cuffed him in the face to keep his attention. “Listen to me,” he said. “Where did they go?”
“I tell you the truth,” Scuric groaned. “All of it. I just help with passport sometimes. New names—I’ll give them to you—all Hong Kong SAR blanks. Good shit. Really, I have no idea where they go.”
It never failed to amaze Quinn that tough guys who bullied women caved so quickly during a comparatively mild interrogation. “The one with the weasel nose,” he said. “Who is he?”
“A snakehead,” Scuric said. “I only ever call him Jiàn.” The Croatian brightened as if he had news that might save him. “I do some business with Jiàn, moving people sometimes. He don’t know I learned some Chinese when I move Afghan heroin sometimes. Him and Fengs, they talked freely on the mobile. . . .” His voice trailed off.
“And,” Quinn prompted, “what did they say?”
“I tell you, you let me go?”
“I only want to find the Fengs,” Quinn lied. “I have no problem with you.”
“They are going to meet someone named ‘Big Business. ’ ”
“That makes no sense,” Quinn said, looking up at Song.
She shook her head. “Tell me what you heard in Chinese.”
“He said ‘
Da Ye
.’ ” Scuric nodded his misshapen head. “That means ‘big business,’ right?”
“Da Ye.” Song looked at Quinn, shaking her head as if she didn’t want to believe it. “Big Uncle.”
“Who’s Big Uncle?” Quinn asked.
“A triad boss your FBI has been hunting for more than a decade. They know he exists, but have no idea what he looks like. Very notorious.”
Quinn smiled, trying to imagine someone being a little bit notorious. “And how about the Ministry of State Security?” he asked.
“Oh, we know exactly who he is,” Song said. “But he causes problems for your FBI. That’s no problem for us. When last I heard, he was in Madrid.” She took the cell phone from her vest pocket and moved a half step away to make a call.
“Those Fengs,” Scuric said quietly to Quinn as if they were partners now that Song was otherwise engaged. “They are, how you say it? Bad news. I fed them and, you know, showed them hospitality since I worked with Jiàn sometimes. They used two of my girls before they left. That little Ehmet Feng, he’s . . . wrong in the head. He carved up both girls with Serb cutter once they finish with . . . you know, hospitality. Sick bastard killed them all like it was nothing.”
“I wonder where he got a Serb cutter?” Quinn felt the urge to kick the Croatian in his crooked head. Song turned and stared down at him in disgust, the phone still to her ear. Scuric noticed her darkening mood and changed tack.
“I heard the little shit, Ehmet, say something else on the phone,” he said. “Wherever they are going, they have some big plan.” He nodded for effect. “They talked about something called the Black Dragon. Some kind of Chinese weapon—”
Song’s pistol barked twice as she put two quick rounds in the man’s heart. Stunned, Scuric’s mouth opened and closed like a dying fish with a stomped head.
Quinn, who was surprised by little in the world, jumped at the sudden gunfire. He leveled his pistol at Song and glared. “What was that?”
Song put her gun slowly on the ground and raised both hands. “A man who would stand by and do nothing while another murdered two young girls is a murderer himself.”
“No argument there,” Quinn said, glancing through the foliage at the beach. He wondered who else had heard the shots. “Still—”
“He had knowledge of sensitive Chinese technology.” She cut him off with a dismissive shrug, as if she shot people every day, but Quinn could see the worry lines at the corners of her mouth had deepened. She wasn’t used to this. “My government cannot allow that information to leak.”
Quinn took a deep breath. “Well, it sounds like the entire weapon has leaked and is in the wind. I doubt Scuric’s rudimentary knowledge posed much of a threat.”