Authors: Michael Genelin
T
he schloss was located in Austria near the small town of Rohrau, close to both the Slovak and Hungarian borders. It had taken a full day of persuasion by Jana and her associates in Hungary and Austria to prod the Austrian police into action. The Austrians never did anything that was not according to the letter of the law, and for an operation of this type they needed permissions and approvals from Vienna and, it seemed to Jana, everyone else in the Austrian government. However, when the last of the permissions came, the operation was carried out without a flaw.
The police officers were spaced out around the castle’s outer wall, the largest group focused on the rear, backed by woods. They had brought scaling ladders so they could mount the wall. Jana and most of the police were at the front. Jarov and Seges were delegated to watch over Guzak until the operation began. The Austrians had even brought a tank-like vehicle that could punch a hole through the wall and provide cover for them if they needed to assault the main building.
When the deployment was complete, Jana signaled Jarov and Seges. The four of them, along with Jana’s Austrian counterpart, a man named Linden, walked to the large entry gate. Linden’s men had the gate off its hinges and on the ground within minutes.
They followed the long, curving path through immaculately tended lawns toward the twin-turreted eighteenth-century building known as Schloss Bruckner. The police in the rear scaled the walls and advanced toward the rear of the huge mansion, ready to break in when the signal came. Jana picked up the pace, hoping to get inside before any violent confrontation could happen.
As they progressed, Jana took in the grounds and the schloss itself. The building was stately, beautiful, ivy-covered. There were plantings everywhere which would, in the summer, make this a green paradise. The perfect condition of the estate testified to the care that had been taken. It was an Eden for the wealthy, and the Borydas were now wealthy.
Before they had come to the schloss, Jana had asked that the Austrian police go through the land records for the last century. The locals confirmed that the building and grounds had been in terrible condition for decades, until it had been purchased three years earlier. The new owners had spent enormous amounts of money to re-landscape, restore, and redecorate the castle, inside and out.
The new owner was a woman who claimed an aristocratic lineage that nobody believed. However, as long as she paid her bills, the locals were only too happy to feed her fantasy.
Jana, too, had done her research. Klaudia was using her maiden name, to keep Boryda off the land records.
They walked up to the huge front door. Jana rang the anachronistic contemporary doorbell. A few moments later, a nondescript man dressed in a suit and tie opened the door, gazed at the police officers with some surprise, pointed them in the general direction of the interior of the building, and informed them that the Borydas were in conference.
Jana had a vague impression of familiarity, but she went with the group, through the massively chandeliered reception area, into a large hall at the end of which were the carved doors the butler had pointed to. As Jana grasped one of the ornate metal door handles, Linden held a hand up for her to stop.
“They’ll be out in a moment.”
Jana wondered if it was Austrian courtesy, or the respect for authority the massive schloss engendered, that made Linden ask that they wait. Jana’s patience lasted for all of thirty seconds. She pulled the doors open and stalked inside. The others quickly followed her.
They plunged into a chamber that could have served as a ballroom. Klaudia and Ivan Boryda were seated as far away from each other as they could get. Klaudia Boryda appeared stiff and uncomfortable, because she was quite dead. She had been shot twice in the chest. Ivan Boryda looked stiff and uncomfortable, but he had only been shot in the shoulder.
As soon as Jana saw Klaudia Boryda’s body, she remembered the identity of the man who had greeted them at the front door. Jana had only glimpsed him previously when he had been part of a murder team, beating a man to death on a sunny day in Vienna. Jana whirled, yelling for Jarov to follow her, then ran through the outer room to the front door.
“Stop the man who let us in!” she commanded.
Jana raced for the front gate. She saw a car appear around the corner of the house and accelerate toward the front entrance. Jana shouted to the police at the front gate. No one seemed to pay any attention. The grounds were so extensive, they were so far away, that they could not hear her.
She took an extreme measure to get their attention: she pulled out her pistol and fired several shots in the air. The men at the gate took notice and tried to block the car. At the last moment several of them were forced to leap out of the way as the car rammed through. A fusillade of shots by the police ensued.
As soon as the car was out of Jana’s sight, she heard the thump of metal against stone. Jana sprinted, arriving at the gate to see a cluster of police, their guns drawn, surrounding the car, which had slammed into the schloss’s outer wall. The man who had killed Klaudia Boryda was dead.
They got Ivan Boryda to a clinic in Hainburg, a small town close to the Danube. The clinic was surprisingly large and well equipped. The medical personnel wheeled Boryda into surgery, and within forty-five minutes they wheeled him out again and put him into a room, which the police secured. The wound was superficial, the doctors told them, so Jana could interview him.
Jana walked in, accompanied by Officer Jarov and Guzak. Boryda visibly winced when he saw Guzak.
“You know Mr. Guzak, I see.”
“I’ve never seen him before,” Boryda mumbled, very deliberately keeping his eyes averted.
“Mr. Guzak says he has seen you on several prior occasions.”
“That would not be unusual, considering that I’ve made so many public appearances.”
Jana turned to Guzak. “Where did you meet Mr. Boryda?”
“At his home in Bratislava.”
“Many times?”
“Lots of times.”
Jana turned back to Boryda, inquisitively.
“He’s lying.” Boryda’s tone was not convincing. He was trying to look wan and in pain, but could not quite pull off the role of the invalid.
“Your wife is dead.”
“The doctors told me. I’m devastated,” Boryda claimed. His tone was not convincing. “She was a great human being.” He went into a rote summary of all the wonderful characteristics his wife had had, what a personal bereavement her death was and what a great loss to the Slovak people. “She will be missed,” he concluded his speech, giving them a preview of what he would say to the media.
He disgusted Jana. She leaned close to him. “You killed her,” she declared. Boryda stared back at her, suddenly wary.
“Why?” Jana demanded. “Did you hate her so much?”
Boryda practiced looking shocked. “How could you say that? I
loved
my wife.”
Jana was even more disgusted.
“No one will buy that lie. You were having an affair with a legislator.” Jana deliberately didn’t mention Sofia’s name. “It’s been all over the Slovak news for months.”
Boryda was not contrite. “That has nothing to do with my wife’s death.”
“It certainly doesn’t look good.” She indicated Guzak. “What Mr. Guzak tells me is also rather disquieting. He says that you and your wife have been involved in smuggling activities, in money-laundering activities, bribery, election fraud, and in taking money from government contractors.” She stopped herself. “You know all about it, so I don’t have to spell it out.” She turned back to Guzak. “You told me that there was a missing shipment in your smuggling venture. Is that correct?”
“We delivered it. I think
he
took it. They thought
I
was the one. They blamed everybody except him. People are getting killed because of it.”
Jan turned to Boryda. “You’ve been spending huge amounts of money on the schloss, huge amounts of money on your campaigns. Where has this money come from, Mr. Deputy Prime Minister?”
“My wife had money.”
“No. She
wanted
money. There’s a difference. That’s true, isn’t it, Mr. Deputy Prime Minister who is now never going to be Prime Minister?”
Boryda didn’t answer.
“You were shot in the arm, Boryda; the fleshy part of the arm. No real damage. Your wife was murdered, shot at close range, while you were in the same room. Explain that.”
“The man came in and shot her. We wrestled for the gun. He was enormously strong, and he threw me across the room. Then he shot me.” The words came out as if memorized, a bad actor mouthing a bad script.
“Not good, Boryda. You wanted her dead. She was interfering with the life you wanted. So ‘out with the old, in with the new,’ right?”
He sat up in bed, the invalid’s role forgotten.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Let me tell you about the man who fired the shots, including that stupid flesh wound in your arm. He worked with a woman; they were a team. He wouldn’t have come alone to kill someone . . . unless it was a setup, an easy murder. When we arrived unexpectedly, we spoiled your play.”
“You’re not a police officer in Austria. You have no right to arrest me here.”
“The Austrians are ready to talk to you when I’m finished. I assure you, they’ll arrest you no matter what you say. Furthermore, you had to know that Mr. Guzak’s brother and mother were going to be murdered.”
His normally ruddy complexion had paled. “His mother was not supposed to be there.”
“Things never quite go right when murder is planned.” Jana watched Boryda collapse. If Jana hadn’t known how slight his wound was, she would have sworn he was dying. “The records we’ll find at the schloss, all the money you’ve spent, the money in your bank accounts, all of this will bring you down.”
She turned as if to go, stopped and turned back.
“There is one other thing: Kamin! Things might go easier for you if you help us get him. He’s the spider at the center of the smuggling web. I want to kill the spider.
“How do I do it, Mr. Boryda?”
J
ana didn’t need Boryda’s information on Kamin after all.
The two-day-old aroma of a dead body had forced the neighbors upstairs and downstairs to call the police. The police went to a small apartment at the city’s north edge overlooking Staromestská Drive, found a body, and called Jana’s people, who in turn called her.
Jana, who was forewarned about the condition of the body, limited her capacity to smell by a liberal application of camphor salve inside her nostrils. When she walked into the room, Jana immediately realized who was sitting propped up in the bed, a book neatly placed on his lap. Kamin looked as if he had fallen asleep while reading. But he had closely patterned bullet wounds in his body, and one, at very close range, to his head. A large powder burn on his forehead indicated just how close the shooter had been.
He give the impression of being surprised, almost shocked, his lips drawn back in a rictus as if he was ready to argue with the person who had startled him. The room was clean, his bag packed. Jana checked the book on his lap. It was a religious tract about a sect headquartered in India.
The name Solti suddenly came to Jana’s mind. Nepal, the country where Solti had been killed, was next door to India. Jana checked the back of the book. It gave her the sect’s contact information in a number of cities around the world. She made a mental note to call one of them when she got back to the station. Maybe they would know something about Solti or Kamin.
The bullets that had killed Kamin were of a small caliber, like the bullets that had killed the younger Guzak. Jana told the coroner’s assistants to inform the coroner that she wanted an immediate autopsy. She then instructed her people to take the slugs from the body to ballistics as soon as the coroner released them. She wanted to compare them with those from the Guzaks’ bodies.
Everything in the room, except Kamin, was neat and tidy. There was nothing of any personal value, except Kamin’s unopened bag. A search of the bag merely produced clothes and a Dopp kit containing the usual shaving and bath articles. Jana tore the lining out of the piece of luggage, without results.
The people in the neighboring apartments had no information. All they knew was that the man had moved into the furnished flat, and that was the last they ever saw or heard of him until the aroma of death began leaking out of the apartment. The landlord was even less helpful: he had never even seen Kamin. The rent arrived in the mail; the landlord had left the key in the unlocked mailbox for Kamin to pick up when he’d moved in.
Jana went back to the office, slightly depressed. The long-sought-after confrontation with Kamin would never take place. She wanted personally to excoriate him, to skin him alive, to watch Kamin being drawn and quartered. Jana had worked so hard to get him, putting together a case against him piece by piece, hoping to make him squirm as a result of her skill. Now that satisfaction had been denied her. His death alone was not enough.
She called Sofia, even though the ballistics comparison had not yet been made. Jana was sure that Kamin had been shot with the same gun that had killed the younger Guzak and his mother.
When Jana told Sofia about finding Kamin’s body, Sofia expressed no feelings. There was no affect from Sofia, no anger, no rage, no horror, no satisfaction of revenge, no satisfaction of any sort. Most of all, there had been no relief, no sense that a weight had been taken off her shoulders with the knowledge that Kamin was dead.
Jana had dealt with rape victims before. They had different responses. Jana checked her memory bank. In another case she had handled some years back, the victim had bottled up her anger, suppressed all her fear, until one day she ran into the man at a market where she was working. She’d killed him with a screw driver. She had stabbed him twenty-nine times, her bottled rage suddenly surfacing. Jana had a gut reaction: one day all those feelings would boil out of Sofia. Jana prayed Sofia’s would not be as violent a catharsis.
Jana telephoned Karina, the waitress at Gremium, asking her for another favor. Then she began putting the pieces of her case together, charting the information, setting the witnesses in their proper places. Jana stepped back, looked at the picture she had developed, then realized she hadn’t yet gotten in touch with the religious sect. Jana phoned the London branch and reached a pleasant lady who spoke heavily accented English and tried to question Jana about her religious beliefs.
The woman did not know Solti and had never heard of Kamin, but she was interested in the fact that Jana was with the police. Was Jana, by any chance, investigating the murder of the Master and the explosion during services in Mumbai, India this past year? No one had ever been caught. Wasn’t it time the police did something?
Jana extracted the details from her. The information was followed by more proselytizing. Jana managed to terminate the conversation with some difficulty, although managing to remain polite.
One more factor to be considered.
Jana registered the date of the event, then made an appointment with Colonel Trokan, asking him to have Captain Bohumil at the meeting. As she was preparing to go to the conference room, a large package arrived from Hungary. It was the luggage containing Solti’s belongings.
Jana went through the tightly packed clothes, all still neatly in place. Then she cut the lining out of the suitcase. When she had finished, she left the clothes on the floor of her office, closed the suitcase, and carried it to the conference room.
Everything had come together.
The colonel and Captain Bohumil arrived on time. Seges, his usual obsequious self when either of them was around, brought in a coffeepot and cups. They exchanged some general pleasantries. Trokan told a small joke, which received an even smaller response. As soon as Seges left, Jana started the briefing.
She began with the dates of the murders, including the ones in India. These came as a surprise to both Trokan and Bohumil. She then related everything she knew about the smuggling ring, the murders in Hungary, the killing of the Guzaks, both mother and son, the death of Klaudia Boryda and, finally, that of Kamin, which had only been discovered that morning.
“The killings were not only ruthless, but methodical, and pursuant to a plan to eliminate a group of people.”
“What group?” Bohumil asked.
“A cadre: worker ants in an organization, people who had become liabilities. There was a line of communication, a network from India through Europe, then into North and South America. Then there was a breakdown, a large one, when a shipment that the network specialized in went missing.”
“Kamin was one of these people?” Trokan asked.
“Yes. I think Solti, the man killed in Nepal, was the general manager of the network. The Indian sect, with temples in a number of major cities around the world, was probably an alternative route for the organization. It had a superb capability for a criminal group: followers who would deliver items without any questions. Then there were the smugglers, professionals who knew what the safe routes were. Most of them had family ties to one another, or long-term relationships.”
“Smuggling what?”
“An organization’s lifeblood.”
“What does that mean?” Bohumil grumbled.
“What makes any company successful?” She looked at both men, not really expecting an answer. “Money, of course. In the criminal world, particularly the organized criminal world, how do you pay for what you buy? How do you pay for shipments of stolen goods? For example, how do you pay for shiploads of narcotics? How does the buyer pay the seller? How does the seller pay his people overseas?”
“Gray money. You launder transactions. You do it through bank transfers,” Bohumil ventured, still unsure of where Jana was going. “What does that have to do with these deaths?”
Trokan was beginning to understand. “Money transfers. But international money transfers are now scrutinized. Banks check deposits more closely. Illegal transfers of large amounts are picked up. Anti-money-laundering laws are in place. Computers locate illegal deposits. And every country in the world is checking everyone else’s faxes, e-mails, and telephone calls. It’s hard to transfer illegal cash now.”
“They had to find a new way to do it, an alternate route,” Jana added. “They set up a reliable method, one the banks and their monitoring efforts did not reach.”
“They smuggled cash?” Bohumil asked, his voice and manner disbelieving. “Have you ever seen how much space a million dollars or a million euros take up? The package would be enormous. Multiple packages would have to be sent on a continuing basis, which would make it even more impractical.”
“Worse,” said Jana, wearing her best cat-ate-the-canary look. “They would still have to keep the money in a safe repository when it reached its destination. Where would they store it? Banks are the only safe place. But they couldn’t go to a bank and deposit this money, as we know.” She looked to Bohumil, then to Trokan, waiting for them to answer.
As before, Trokan made the leap. “The diamond that your friend Sofia was sent.”
Jana nodded, appreciating Trokan’s effort. Bohumil was now even more bewildered than before.
Jana was still wearing it. She took it from her neck for the last time, letting it dangle on its chain to be admired. Then she placed it in the center of the table.
“Were they trading diamonds?” Bohumil asked.
“Not trading. Paying with diamonds.”
“How does this diamond tell you that?”
“Not just this diamond. These. . . .”
Jana opened Solti’s suitcase, pouring the contents into the middle of the table, a rain of diamonds. They sparkled, one on top of the other, piling up into a small tower of brilliance that seemed to fill the space on the table, and more.
“How much is it worth?” Bohumil finally gulped out.
“I don’t know,” Jana admitted. “Millions,” she hazarded.
“Millions,” echoed Trokan.
“How do we know these aren’t just simply stolen gems?”
“A theft with a description of diamonds like these, of this size, would have been news all over the world. Nothing like this has been reported, nothing even remotely close.”
Bohumil reached out and gingerly took one of the stones and stared at it. “Very beautiful,” he crooned, entranced.
Trokan finally nudged him. “Put it back.”
Bohumil was discomfited. “I was just looking at it.” He put it back on the pile.
“Inventory the diamonds after the meeting,” Trokan ordered Jana. “Where did we find them?”
“In the lining of Solti’s suitcase. My guess is, he became greedy. He took the contents of a package. When the empty package came to the end of its route, the question for the intended recipients was a tough one: who in the chain had taken the contents? They didn’t know.”
“So they decided to roll up the entire network?”
“Kill everyone,” Jana confirmed. “An object lesson for anyone else who might think of doing the same thing.”
“The smuggler in Hungary,” Trokan suggested.
“And all the others,” Jana added.
“Why Klaudia Boryda and not Ivan?” Bohumil asked, his eyes still on the heap of diamonds on the table.
“She took a diamond. Just one. From a package. She thought she could take only one and get away with it, even if it was a big one. My guess is, she also raided other packages. Who would know, she must have thought. But the bosses who ran the network could tell, by the weight of the package.”
“Why would they have spared her for this long?”
“Because of her husband, the deputy prime minister. It puzzled me for a while.” She made an apologetic gesture. “I should have seen it right away: He had diplomatic immunity. He walked through customs without any examination. What a lovely prospect for them: he was the perfect smuggler. Then Ivan Boryda revealed that he would happily continue working with them as a transporter of diamonds even if they killed his wife.”
They sat in silence, focused on the pile of diamonds.
Trokan finally broke the spell. “Enough!” he demanded, standing.
Bohumil followed the colonel’s example, standing, but still staring at the gems, having a hard time breaking away from them.
“Don’t forget to inventory them, Commander,” he reminded Jana. “And write up your reports,” he ordered. “I want them quickly as you can. I need to inform the powers that be.”
“I will, Colonel.”
“I appreciate your hard work, Commander,” Bohumil said.
“I want to talk to Commander Matinova for a minute,” Trokan said. The captain nodded to Jana, then walked out. Trokan waited until he was sure that Bohumil was out of earshot.
“What about the person who killed Kamin? And the one involved in the Guzak killings?”
“I’m working on it.”
“And the killing of the Swiss police officer?”
“Soon.”
“Good.”
“I want some leeway in handling one of the suspects. The woman.”
He stared at Jana. “As long as it does not come back to our doorstep.”
“I understand.”
He pointed at the diamonds, a grin on his face. “Too bad you can’t keep any of these.”
He left just as Jana’s cell phone rang.
Karina had come through again. Her network of street friends was proving quite valuable. Jana thanked her, promising to stop by soon.
Events had worked themselves out.
Jana now had the information that she needed about the woman.