Eye of the Negotiator
Executive Suite, Worldwares Trading Corporation, 17 Phetchaburi Road, Bangkok
"You know I've been here before." Conrad was looking around my new office with an odd look of nostalgia on his face. I was a bit disappointed that he wasn't impressed by the view out of the window stretching across the city towards the Chaophrya River or hadn't made any sarcastic remarks about me sitting behind a desk with an executive assistant in the office outside. Dammit, I even have a conference room, all of my own. Also, I couldn’t quite see how he could have been here before; Worldwares Trading had only moved in last month and the company hadn’t existed the month before that.
"When was that? It must have been some time ago." I knew beyond any reasonable doubt that this was the first time Conrad had visited our new headquarters so logically he must have been here before we moved in. That was quite possible, the building had been largely derelict and unused since its original developers had gone bankrupt half way through construction. After nearly two decades, it had become a question of whether the shell, occupying prime real estate, should be knocked down and replaced or finished. We'd picked the incomplete shell up for chump change, completed it using contractors who owed us serious favors and then made a fortune by renting it out. The best bits of course, we'd kept for ourselves. We have a shopping mall on the ground three floors, then a series of businesses most of whom had got their lease at highly preferential rates because they paid tribute to us, and then there's us on the top floors. We're predators you see, we like being up high.
"Back in 1992, during the Kanya Tamaraptri case. The gang responsible hung out in this building. They never came all the way up here of course, or at least I don’t think so, but they had their drinking sessions on one of the lower floors. Strange to think that it was eighteen years ago."
It's been sixteen years since Conrad, and I started working together and that seems strange as well. In that time, I've gone from being a low-ranking street thug to the Vanguard of my Triad and I owe it all to Conrad. Conrad's still alive and he owes that to me. One of the nice things about our admittedly unconventional relationship is that we are both keenly aware of what we owe each other and neither of us make a fuss over it.
There was a tactful knock on the door and my executive assistant, Kultilda Sathianthai, came in with a pot of tea and a plate of small cakes. She made a very polite wai to Conrad that set her blonde air swinging and set the tray down on the small table next to my desk. Once she'd poured tea for us, she quietly backed out of the room and closed the door behind her. Conrad sipped his tea and looked around again. "You're becoming a real business-woman Angel. Even down to having a secretary?"
"Don't be deceived by Koi, Conrad. She's a gun-chick like me. A Red Pole enforcer. Almost everybody in this office is hooked up one way or another." He knew that 'hooked up' didn’t mean 'in a relationship' but 'a career criminal'. There are very few people in Worldwares Trading who aren't. It looks like a standard, if luxurious, business headquarters and that's not misleading. It is, but it’s a business with a very hard edge. If somebody tries to muscle a company that looks to us for protection, it is quite probable that they'll meet Koi, or somebody like her. That will not be a good day for them.
It's also a standing principle in the 14K that everybody has an open, legal job that they can use to explain their income. Worldwares Trading provides a lot of those jobs. I really am the CEO of the company which isn’t surprising since I thought the idea up a few months ago in Wales. What we do is take products from companies or countries that can't sell them on the open market for some reason and relabel them using the identity of a company in which we hold an interest. Then we market the relabeled goods as the products of somewhere that can legally supply them. I saw that as a side-benefit of a deal that I worked out to solve a problem for the British government. It turned out to have a much wider application than I had realized and we're already making money at an impressive rate. Even governments have started to use us to get hold of things they can't obtain by normal routes. It's all illegal of course but sometimes what may be technically illegal is practically essential.
I came around and sat by Conrad on his side of my desk. I'd asked him to come over, and sent a limo for him, because I've developed a dislike for bringing my work home. It's not just because there's a side of my work that I don’t want Conrad to know about but because since I'm working out of an office, I don't see him as much as I'd like. Anyway, this really is work. You see, Conrad really does work for us sometimes. He’s not a member of the Society, since he has no Chinese blood although that restriction has relaxed a lot over the last three decades. These days, just having a drop or two is enough. Conrad’s a sort of consultant. We've established a system where if one of our members has been accused of something like skimming funds, he has a "friend" who will help him defend himself against the charge. Conrad helps that friend, trying to find out if the accused really is guilty and if he was, whether there were any mitigating factors. His 'payment' for the assistance is that if the person he aided is exonerated, we compensate them for the false accusation. If they are guilty, we extend leniency, usually exile rather than liquidation. What had landed on my desk though was something a bit different. It was a direct request for his assistance from another criminal group.
"Conrad, have you ever heard of the Společenství?"
"No, don’t think so. It sounds Czech." Conrad had one of the little iced cakes, a lemon one. I prefer the chocolate ones myself.
"It is. It means 'The Society' and it’s the largest organized crime society in the Czech Republic. Their patron is the Solntsevskaya Bratva."
"Ah." Conrad knows very well that the Solntsevskaya Bratva and the 14K Triad have very close and amicable relations.
"Well, the Společenství have started up in the security and protection business and, following the advice from their patrons, they are doing it the soft way. One of their clients is a man called Pavel Byrtus. He's the head of a major Czech engineering conglomerate working mostly in the oil and gas industry. Last week, he went on a short business trip and came back to find his wife and children in process of being murdered. Very brutally. The killers attacked him as well. He survived although he's in a coma and it’s a toss-up as to whether he will recover. Obviously, this is a major humiliation for both the Společenství and the Bratva. The Bratva have contacted us and asked us if you can come over and help with the investigation. It's taken for granted I'll be coming with you of course."
"Can't the Czech police handle this?"
"They could, but this is an extremely high-profile case and there will be a lot of pressure on them to make an early arrest. Any arrest. The Bratva want to make sure that the people who are arrested actually did it. Also, by bringing us in, they are showing that they spare no expense in finding the perps and seeing they are punished."
I watched Conrad nodding. The situation where the police are pressured to make an arrest, any arrest is one he's familiar with and the cause behind most of the cases he gets involved in. "What is likely to happen to the perps if they get caught?"
He means, of course, will they die a hideous and agonizing death? My first thought was 'of course' but then I started to think it over. Given how the Russians feel about children and how the Byrtus kids are believed to have died, I suspected 'hideous and agonizing' wouldn't even begin to cover it but then I considered the wider aspects. This was indeed a high-profile case and the reputations of the Společenství and the Bratva were on the line. The perps had to be punished and be seen to be punished. Just disappearing wouldn’t be enough. They had to go on trial and go through the full process in the glare of publicity. The more I thought about that, the more I realized why Conrad was being asked to come and help. He would make sure the right people were arrested and that the case was watertight. That would ensure everybody understood the right people had been found and punished.
"They'll be tried in court and, if found guilty, executed. The Czech Republic uses hanging so I am told."
Conrad nodded and snagged another lemon tea-cake. I had to admit, they were extremely good; there is a baker down in the mall who pays a generous tribute to us. In fact, he pays us significantly more than we had suggested might be appropriate and in return we push as much profitable business his way as we can. As a result, he's doing well down there which is unusual for a mall-based business. The truth is, malls are financial mortality sinks for small businesses and even big chains struggle. Looking at the waiting list for open units, I got a mental picture of cows hammering on the doors of a slaughterhouse demanding to get in. "All right Angel. Tell our Russian friends we are on our way."
You have no idea how relieved that made me feel. Not at doing the job, I know well enough that Conrad wouldn’t turn this down. It's because I can get out of this damned office. "Great. Koi, book us tickets for Prague."
Boeing 3707 "Yuliana", Aeroflot Flight 110 from Bangkok to Moscow.
Koi knows her job. She'd booked us into the middle of the Boeing, the seats where the aircraft's porpoising while taxying is least pronounced and the noise from the aft-mounted engines less annoying. Until recently I rarely travelled supersonic and preferred to save money by using people-haulers. Now, though, my position means I have to travel supersonic so that I have the proper level of gravitas when I meet associates. The problem is, we don’t get a free meal on the supersonic aircraft although we do get a free drink. The loading process is a bit different from people-haulers as well. The luggage in a 3707 is carried in a belly pod that is detached from the aircraft and towed into the departure gate building where it is opened up. Passengers put their bags into their locker in the pod and board the aircraft. Just before take-off the pod is closed, locked and towed out to be hung under the aircraft. I’d just heard the thud as it was hoisted up and attached to its shackles.
"This is Aeroflot Flight 110 from Bangkok to Moscow and your Captain, Anna Pavlovna Kapranova speaking. We will be taking off very shortly and our flight time will be approximately two hours and ten minutes. We will be cruising at Mach 3.25 and an altitude of 23,775 meters. As soon as we have climbed to our operational altitude, the cabin staff will be distributing complimentary drinks. They will also be giving you the landing documentation, consisting of an arrivals card and customs declaration. Passengers who will be remaining in the Rodina, with the exception of Russian and American citizens of course, must also fill in an alien’s registration card with your proposed address in Russia. Now, please fasten your seat belts, fold your tables and move your seatback to the erect position ready for take-off."
There was a click and a different voice took over, obviously a pre-recorded message. " O Gospod' Iisus Khristos, nash Bog, istinnyy i zhivoy Put', Kotoryy zhelal puteshestvovat' s Tvoim strazhem Iosifom i Tvoyey samoy chistoy Devoy Mater'yu v Yegipet i soprovozhdal Lyuka i Kleopu na ikh puti v Emmaus: teper' my smirenno umolyayem Tebya, O, samyy svyatoy Uchitel', Ty teper' soprovozhdayesh' Svoikh slug na etom samolete po Tvoyey milosti. Otprav' k nam Tvoyego slugu Tobiasa, angela v kachestve provodnika i okhrannika, zashchishchayushchego i osvobozhdayushchego nas ot vsyakogo zlogo napadeniya na vragov, vidimykh i nevidimykh."
The message was a prayer for safe travel. Believers, including Conrad of course, closed their eyes and folded their hands to join in the prayer. It's considered really impolite to poke fun at people's religion, so unbelievers kept quiet and looked straight ahead. By the time the priest had finished, the aircraft had been towed clear of the gate and was beginning its move towards the runway. Sneaky piece of misdirection because if people are going to panic, they'll do it when the aircraft starts to move. So, make them think of something else.
One thing that surprised me when I started to fly supersonic was how fast the supersonics accelerate when they start their take-off run. People-haulers seem to waddle down the runway and haul themselves into the sky. In supersonics, there is a slam in the back as they streak along the tarmac and pull up into a steep climb. Apparently, the economics of supersonic air travel require the aircraft to get up where the air is thin and cold as fast as possible. I'll take people's word for that. What I could see was that we were climbing at an acute angle and the color of the sky was changing from blue to black as we swept on upwards.
It seemed impossible that we had reached cruise altitude so quickly, but I could feel the aircraft levelling out. To confirm it, one of the stewardesses came around with our complimentary shot of vodka and our forms. We showed her our passports and tickets, she gave us the customs and arrival forms. I saw her mouth twitch slightly at the sight of my boys, but my American passport covered them. By the way, a lot of people think I travel on false passports. I don’t. All my passports are the real thing including the American passport I'm using right now.
Conrad had settled down to read the case file he had been given. I’d already read my copy and knew how much what he was reading must upset him. The details of what had happened in the Byrtus house made bad reading. I could see acute distress on his face. If somebody knew our secret, they could make a pretty good guess of how old he was from the impact of grief. Anyway, I'd already read my copy, so I curled up and went to sleep.
When I woke up, we were already making our final approach to Moscow Sheremetevo International Airport. I took a quick look at our documents, making sure Conrad hadn’t made an error in filling them in. He’d filled my profession in as “Corporate CEO” although he could have put “Professional Assassin” and it wouldn’t have made any difference. ‘This is Russia’ as my Bratva associates like to say.
“Thoughts?” I noted he had put the file away.
“If the Czech police work is as good as their report suggests, they’re top-rank people. This is a bad case Angel, as bad as anything I’ve ever seen. We’ll need to talk to the forensic people as soon as we can.” He would have said more but the bump as the aircraft touched down put a stop to the conversation.
So, we went back into the arrivals gate and picked up our bags from the pod-locker. As soon as we were clear, the arrivals gate would become a departure gate and the passengers back for Bangkok would start to load. We made our way through the walkway to the subsonic section of the airport. There, we checked the departures board to find the České Aerolinie flight to Prague. It would be taking off in an hour and be open for boarding in 35 minutes. That gave us just enough time to wander around the duty-free purchase area. It was the usual tourist rubbish of course although there were one or two booths that showed off quality Russian products. One of them was the Molut-Oruzhiye Concern that makes sporting long-arms. The salesman on the stand took one look at my boys and switched to English for his sales pitch on their new rifle chambered for 9.3x65mm. Give him credit, it was a very well-made rifle and the design was good. The three-round magazine was small for my taste but with a big round like that, I suppose five rounds would have been unwieldy. I felt myself succumbing to temptation. I replied in Russian, asking some technical questions on the possibility of mounting a scope. He pointed out that it was already tapped for one and showed me the range of scopes produced by a prestigious Russian optics company. Somehow, by the time we had finished, we had one of the new rifles fitted with an image-intensifying scope specified out.
“You come from Bangkok, Barynya Angel? If you wish to purchase your rifle here, our new store in Bangkok is opening next week and we can deliver it from there direct to your address.” That did it. I paid for the rifle and gave him my office address which made him laugh. “That is the address of our new store also. Thank you for your order and may you have many happy hours hunting with your new rifle.”
The aircraft for our flight to Prague was a Fairey Air-Bus F310. One of the older ones with the four engines at the rear rather than under the wings. One of the elephant’s trunks took us to the lower-deck entrance appropriate to our seat number. We went into the lower deck, stored our bags in our locker and then went up to the stairs to the main passenger deck to find our seats. And that was that. Here is something to think about. Assuming we arrived on time, which we did, we would be landing in Prague before we took off from Bangkok, measured in local time of course. Aren’t supersonics wonderful?
Once we had touched down in Ruzyně Airport, we waited until the floor lights for our row came on, went downstairs and picked up our bags from our locker. Then, we took the Bucharest Agreement channel through immigration . . .
The Bucharest Channel? Citizens of Russia, America, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria are part of a travel union that gives its members immigration privileges aimed at cutting down on the bureaucracy. You might notice that they are all Warsaw Pact countries.
The Bucharest Channel has the new electronic passport scanners. Step into a booth and a door closes behind you. That makes me nervous but rumors that people on the wet list find the floor opening underneath them to drop them into an alligator pit have been officially denied. Then, put one’s passport onto a pad, information and picture page down, there’s a click and the door out slide open. That’s it, immigration done. As usual, the customs people sighed audibly when they saw my boys and waved me through sadly. I must admit, I do prefer going through the Diplomatic/VIP channel where I don’t get the theatrics over my boys.
Once we stepped through the doors that took us out of the restricted area, we were met by two Czech police officers.
“Mr. and Mrs. de Llorente? I am Police Lt. Colonel Daniel Kala. This is my associate Police Captain Lenka Vernerova. We understand that Mr. Pavel Byrtus’s insurance company has hired you to assist us with inquiries into the murder of his family?”
Conrad stepped slightly forward in answer. “That is correct, yes. We have been hired to assist you in whatever way we can. Although, to be honest and having read the case file, I do not see there is much we can add that you have not already covered. One thing though, Angel and I are not married. We are cousins, with her coming from the Portuguese side of our family.”
“Ahh, I see, your family comes from Macau then?” Lenka Vernerova was smiling. The Portuguese colonial authorities were well-known for intermarrying with the local dignitaries and putting me as being from Macau was a good, quick cover. It wouldn’t work with the organized crime families; mention a Chinese woman with red hair and two guns coming to see them and anybody with a guilty conscience doesn’t hesitate before diving out of the windows and running screaming for the horizon. But, for law-abiding society, the Free City of Macau is good enough.
"It does." I looked at Lenka curiously. She was a strange contradictory figure. Like all police women she had her hair drawn up in a tight bun on the back of her head. Take it from me, having somebody grab your hair and swing you around by it really hurts. Only her hair was coming loose and strands of it were hanging down her face. Her face looked dirty but wasn't, her clothes looked shabby but weren't, she looked as if she smelled bad but didn’t. It was an odd combination of apparent slovenliness that was contradicted by reality. That was when it clicked; this woman did a lot of undercover work and her own personal appearance had become sublimated to the character she wanted to present. When she was being herself, her own appearance looked neglected even when it wasn't. It was just rarely used.
"I think we should have a meeting between all the parties in this investigation as soon as possible?" Colonel Kala had his pocket organizer out. "You should have a couple of hours to rest after your flight. Should we say seven this evening? Your hotel has a conference room and can provide an excellent buffet dinner. Would that be a good plan?"
Conrad smiled and nodded. "I think that is a very good plan indeed."
2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Two
River View Suite, Smetana Hotel, Karoliny Svetle 208, Prague
"This is good." Conrad was looking around our suite, taking in the luxurious furnishings, the two queen-sized beds and the magnificent view out of the windows. I was more interested in the fact that the way the suite was laid out meant there was no direct line of sight from the door to the beds. That made sleeping a lot safer. So much so I could actually sleep in one of the beds, not on the floor. Conrad was gazing wistfully out of the panorama windows. "Prague has hardly changed since I was last here. It's a miracle looking at what has happened to the rest of Europe."
"When were you last here?"
"1828. I was passing through when a family sickened after their dinner and eventually died. Their cook was accused of poisoning them, but I found they'd died of natural causes. Murine typhus. They'd been on a trip to the countryside and had been infected there, probably by fleas from a feral cat. The irony was that the disease went unrecognized because they were a wealthy family and people back then believed only the poor got typhus. The symptoms are a bit like arsenic poisoning so that's what the poor cook was supposed to have used. It didn't help that the police had beaten a confession out of her. Fortunately for her, two of the children developed the characteristic rash and people had to admit it was typhus. Before we got antibiotics, typhus was a killer."
Content with the room being secure, I'd already opened my wheelie suitcase and was getting the contents put away. There had been a time when I travelled with three pairs of jeans, three tops, three pairs of panties and my boots. Back then, the rest of my bag was filled with ammunition, magazines and a loading machine. Conrad had such a shock the first time he picked it up to carry for me. I know a man offering to carry a lady's baggage is an old-fashioned courtesy but it's one I really appreciate. Not because the bag is heavy but because I like having my hands free.
Now, it's different. I still have boxes of ammunition and magazines in my bag, but I also have a couple of business suits and other business-professional outfits. I was hanging them up in the wardrobe when I heard Conrad chuckling. "There was a time, Angel, when I used to have all the wardrobe space to myself."
"You know what the Russian Marines call that, don’t you? Toughski Shitski."
Conrad laughed and shook his head. "I was in the Mexican Marines; we called it El Tougho Shito."
I was looking at my clothes, deciding what to wear. It was much easier when I wore only black jeans, black nylon sweaters and cowboy boots. I picked out a black silk shirt that was decorated with red flowers and my charcoal-gray pinstripe business suit. That was suitable to this kind of meeting and had the virtue of being in the traditional black-and-red 14K Triad colors. I kept my cowboy boots though.
"How's this, Conrad?"
He looked over and nodded. "Very menacing. Catches the real you."
"Oh good. Ready to go down?" We were chuckling at that exchange all the way down to our meeting room.
The Bratva and the Společenství delegates were already there, waiting for us to appear. The police representatives wouldn't arrive for a half-hour or so. They knew very well that we were gangsters and there would be things we needed to discuss that it was better that they shouldn't know about. If you think relations between nuclear-armed powers require careful diplomacy, you haven't seen the song and dance that surrounds negotiations between the police and organized crime.
Russian gangsters come in two breeds. Some are balding, overweight and wear suits a shade too tight. They are the Suki, the bitches, although it is unwise for an outsider to use that name. Terminally unwise. They started their careers in crime and came up through the Russian prison system. The others are lean, dangerous men who come from the Russian Army, more precisely the Special Forces groups of that Army. They are well-dressed and elegant, but they exude ruthless competence. They are known as the Volki, the wolves. The leader of the Russians was a Volki, in late middle age with careful, watchful eyes that were constantly taking in what was happening. He saw me and suddenly those eyes lit up with joy. "Tovarish Angel! You have come far in the world, bratishka!"
"Vor Volkhov! How are you, Aleksandr Ignatyevich?" You might wonder why Aleksandr Ignatyevich Volkhov addressed me as 'brother'. Answer is simple, the Russian for 'sister' is 'sestra' but this is a form of address only used between women. Sasha and I are both members of the bratva, the brotherhood, so we use bratishka as a form of familiar address. And we are very old comrades.
He looked at me with an affectionate smile. "Old friend, may I?"
I nodded and braced myself. Sasha grabbed me in the traditional Russian bear-hug, but he made sure my arms were free and he kept it really brief. Even so, I could feel myself starting to go green.
"I have prospered." Sasha smiled. "As have you. It is hard to think that Brighton Beach was twenty-five years ago. The years have been very kind to you."
"Kinder than you might think, Sasha. May I introduce Conrad? He is my very special friend."
Another bear-hug. "Tovarish Conrad, you are an immensely fortunate man. I have heard about your exploits and how you solved the most perplexing of cases. We are most honored to have your assistance in this terrible affair."
"You are more than welcome tovarish Aleksandr Ignatyevich. This was a terrible crime indeed. I was reading the file on the way in. This has the odor of a revenge crime to me. The levels of brutality are far above those of a burglary gone wrong."
"I agree, tovarish Conrad." One of the Společenství had stepped forward. "I am Jaroslav Petržilka, head of the Společenství family here in Prague. This terrible affair has been a great shame upon us all and I thank you on behalf of all my brothers for coming to help us. And you, tovarish Angel."
Petržilka had obviously been briefed on etiquette because he didn’t attempt to touch me. He also guessed that Vor Volkhov and I have a very special relationship. One that started at Brighton Beach in 1984 when I had wiped out the better part of two SWAT teams in order to buy him the time, he needed to get the top leaders of the Bratva clear. From that event has grown the worldwide alliance between the Bratva and the Triads. A very profitable alliance for us all and it grew out of a 15 year-old girl and a 22 year-old man whom circumstances had forced into working together for their mutual benefit. There's a lesson there for you.
"We are pleased to be of assistance, Kolega Jaroslav. May I ask a question of fundamental importance? Did you have security guards on the house?"
"We did. Since the father was away, leaving his wife and children on their own, we had two guards present, a man and a woman. Both have disappeared. Normally there would have been a third and possibly a fourth."
All right, I don’t need to tell you that is very bad. When the security guards disappear in a case like this, they immediately become prime suspects. Either that or additional victims. I caught Conrad's eye and he gave me a slight nod. He'd picked up on the same detail. "Pan Petržilka, has the house been searched?"
"The police are doing so, yes. There is no trace of the guards. I know what you are thinking, and I must tell you that these two were trusted members of our family and known to us for some years. I think it unlikely they were involved but you are right. One can only be betrayed by somebody who is trusted absolutely. Anything else is just business. We cannot exclude the possibility yet."
Conrad started his normal process for interviewing people, commencing with innocuous questions and then digging in deeper. By the time he had finished, we had a reasonable picture of what had been happening, but the question was still why? The sheer level of violence in this particular crime seemed not to make any sense at all.
"What do you think, tovarish Angel?" Petržilka seemed anxious, doubtless fearing that I would be highly critical of his actions and that would harm his relationship with the Russians. He was on reasonably safe ground though. The key point is that Prague, and the Czech Republic in general, are relatively peaceful and situations like this are extremely rare. In fact, I can’t think of another case quite like it. There are places in the world where attacks like this happen worryingly frequently, but this is decidedly not one of them.
"Pan Petržilka, I can honestly see no fault in how you handled this. With hindsight, it might be possible to argue that having two guards on-scene was a little light but given the circumstances and background, it was appropriate. Your assessment of the level of threat and its direction was correct. I would recommend you reinforce the guard force you supply to other clients, if nothing else to reassure them that you are aware of their concern. You might well consider adding a K-9 team to the security force as well; a trained man with a trained dog is a dangerous adversary for any criminal. But what happened here is completely unexpected and that implies we are dealing with something we don't understand. Yet."
Conrad nodded in agreement. That was when a hotel employee came in. He spoke quietly to Vor Volkhov and left. "Bratishka, the police have arrived, and the hotel will be setting up the buffet now."
A team of porters arrived and set up a long table down one side of the room. While they were getting our meal and dining table ready, Volkhov went over to greet Colonel Kala and Captain Vernerova. We'd flipped a coin earlier and he'd lost. So, the Bratva were the official hosts. Kala was in a business suit, Vernerova in an evening dress. Once again, she was perfectly made-up and dressed but somehow looked as if she wasn't. I reflected on the fact I'd noticed that and decided Igrat was beginning to have an undue influence on me. Or was it Cristi? I'd have to ask Conrad that.
"Dámy a pánové, the Hotel Smetana welcomes you to our business buffet. We have a madeira-scented pheasant consomme with white bread dumplings, a wild boar broth with pumpkin puree, a ginger-infused lobster bisque or a salad with a selection of local farmer's cheeses." The maître de table stood proudly behind the display while his guests looked at the selection. He caught my eye and discretely pointed at the pheasant consommé. After we had returned to our table our choices were served to us and I found he had steered me to the perfect selection. Well, that is his job, isn't it.
By the time we had finished our soups, the main courses had arrived, been placed on the serving table and the staff discretely departed. We had the room to ourselves and that meant we could talk. What do cops and criminals talk about on social events? Business, of course. Imagine two sets of businessmen from rival companies at a dinner. I've told you this before, but it bears repeating. At a certain level, cops and villains share a lot of interests and in those cases, it serves us both to work together. Even when we're on opposite sides, it helps everybody if we treat each other with respect.
I'd picked out the braised veal cheeks with roasted potatoes and green peas. The meat had been cooked in a cream sauce and was beautiful. Conrad was tucking into a roasted loin of venison with chestnuts, shallots and spinach. He does like his venison and looked very, very happy. In fact, everybody did and so we had the makings of a very successful dinner party. That lasted through desert. Then, the staff returned, cleared the table and set up a series of cork boards for Conrad. It was time for him to sing for our supper and the mood switched from genial enjoyment to what was a very unpleasant business.
"We've both read the files on this case and the first place to start is to try and decide what is going on here." Conrad was standing in front of his corkboards with a pile of 8 by 5 inch cards and a set of colored pens to hand. It is a sort of tradition we have that the investigation of a case doesn't start until the first card gets pinned to the first board. Around the table, everybody was nodding in agreement. "The first obvious case is that some villains learned that Pavel Byrtus was away on business and assumed that he'd taken his family with them. They also assumed that his house would be empty and a ripe target for robbery. Byrtus is well-known to be a rich man so they assumed the pickings would be good. Only, the house wasn't empty. The thieves attacked the family, everything went out of control and spiraled down. Byrtus came home in the middle of the attack and they tried to kill him as well."
There was a lot of 'assumed' there and Conrad knew it. I kept quiet; one thing Conrad hates is having his train of thought interrupted. He carefully wrote 'robbery gone bad' on a card and pinned it to the center board. "There are several problems with this theory though. One of them is that a house like that is never really empty. There would have been servants there, even if the family was away. Do we have a list of the domestic staff?"
"A butler who was in charge of downstairs, two manservants, two maids and a cook." Lenka had the list to hand.
"Six people, all of whom have vanished. And we had the security staff, two people both of whom have vanished as well. That's a total of eleven people, twelve if we include Pavel Byrtus himself."
Conrad hesitated before continuing. "This wouldn’t be a robbery gone bad, this would be a massacre. Unless it was a large gang, it's hard to believe that nobody escaped. After all, the two security people alone would have been able to handle a small group while everybody else made a run for it."
"I assume the two guards were well-qualified?" Colonel Kala asked the question; I guessed that their identities weren't known to the police.
"The man was a veteran of Czech Army special forces, the woman a martial arts expert and provider of self-defense training for women." Petržilka saw me wince slightly and knew what I was thinking. "I know, but gun-chicks are rare here."
One of the problems in the world is that martial arts experts have greatly inflated ideas about their own capabilities. Mostly, they have seen too many films that feature extensive wire-work and assume they can do the same without the wires. Truth is, martial arts training usually just means people get overconfident and don't understand when they are out of their depth. Then they die while they should be doing something useful like running away. Sasha caught my eye and shook his head slightly. I had little doubt that Petržilka would be getting the concept of hiring outside help explained to him.
"There is another problem." Conrad hadn't quite finished with the idea of a robbery gone bad. "One of the many things Angel has taught me is that a caper needs to be completed fast. Get in, do the job, get out. If the Byrtus family had been mixed up in this by chance, they'd have been killed as fast as possible. Shot, stabbed, strangled, whatever would slow the pursuit of the real criminal enterprise down least. Yet the victims here took hours to die. The methodology does not fit the explanation for the crime."
"It might, if the victims were being tortured for the location of the valuables." Lenka had a point there.
"If they had, it would have been over in a few minutes. Jana Byrtus would have given away the information to save her children. Any mother would." Conrad also had a point and it was a comprehensive answer to Lenka's. "It's just possible she didn’t, which is why we can keep the card on the board, but I would rank this as a very unlikely scenario. Angel?"
"Agreed, possible but very unlikely." In case you are wondering, Conrad was genuinely asking me to confirm his opinion. This might surprise you, but we don’t always agree, and we do have blazing rows now and then. First time it happened, he was genuinely scared of me, but those days are long gone. Now when we fight over something, once it's done, it's done. Usually, we then sit in studied silence for an hour or so until we both burst out laughing. Then we make up over dinner. My agreement with him this time was also genuine. A robbery gone wrong had too many negatives for my taste. Taking down a house like that including two security guards was a professional job and professionals don’t torture people for jollies. It suddenly occurred to me that this argument wouldn’t stand if the attackers weren't professionals.
"Next possibility. Defaulting on a loan-shark?" Everybody shook their heads at that. The police had run a legal credit check, we'd run illegal ones, and nobody had come up with any hint that the Byrtus family was in corporate or personal debt. They had lots of liquid family reserves and the company was cash-rich to an almost embarrassing degree. In any case, one can't recover debts from a corpse. In any case, if this was a debt recovery exercise, it would have taken place when Byrtus was present, not in his absence.
I'll trim down the detail on what happened for the next four hours. Essentially, people thought up possible scenarios for the crime and everybody gave their opinions that supported or undermined those scenarios. Eventually, we'd decide how probable the concept was. Highly unlikely on the extreme right, plausible on the left. At the end of that four hours we had only come up with on plausible scenario. Revenge. Note that this was a conclusion Conrad and I had come up with hours earlier. Damn, we're good.
"Conrad, revenge looks the most likely motivation here. Left hand side. Now, why? Money, sex, past wrongs or covering up a crime?"
Those are the four classic motivations for murder. I had a worrying feeling we were about to find a fifth.
"The extreme violence and viciousness of these killings seems to point that way. I'd suggest that the attackers knew Byrtus was away and assumed that they'd have time to do what they intended and leave Byrtus to find the bodies of his family. Only, he arrived early so they simply killed him along with the rest. If this is correct, the bodies of the security guards are somewhere near at hand. Probably buried on the grounds or adjacent to them. The servants, if they aren’t involved, then the same. We need to do a thorough check"
"There's a lot of ground out there. Searching it would take weeks." Sasha looked at me. "Angel, what are you up to? I know that grin."
"Just that there is somebody I know who owes me a big favor, has an all-terrain utility vehicle equipped with a ground-penetrating radar and is a trained archeologist. And, Pan Petržilka, bringing in a British expert will help show how seriously you take this.
"Please, call me Jarek. A radar system like that will be of great value, will it not Colonel?"
"It will indeed. We need to find those bodies. Or be sure they are not there." Kala was obviously not yet convinced that the two security guards were not involved. To be honest, nor was I. "I have looked at ground-penetrating radar with longing in my heart ever since the systems were first marketed. Sadly our budget . . . ."
I handed him one of my Worldwares Trading business cards. "Talk to me. We may be able to fix things for you."
All right, here's how it's done. The world leader in making ground-penetrating radars is an American company called L-5. That company licenses out its technology to an Indian group in which the 14K has an interest. Now, China also produces an unlicensed copy of the L-5 equipment, but they can’t sell it anywhere because it is unlicensed. Even though the American and Chinese equipment are so identical it would take an expert hours to spot the difference. Intellectual Property Rights and all that. So, we buy the Chinese version at a fifth of the price of producing an American one, switch the labels, serial numbers and manufacturer's plates over and sell it at regular prices. A lot bigger profit margin results. If L-5 check up on the sale, the plate leads them straight back to the licensed Indian producer who has all the properly-authentic documentation. Is that neat or what? We do the same with all sorts of things. Multiplying the profit margin on a rivet by five doesn't sound much but when there are tens of millions of them sold every day? This kind of product forgery is beginning to make us as much money as Ai's computer fraud. All goes to prove one can always find a way to generate income if one looks for it.
River View Suite, Smetana Hotel, Karoliny Svetle 208, Prague
"This is good." Conrad was looking around our suite, taking in the luxurious furnishings, the two queen-sized beds and the magnificent view out of the windows. I was more interested in the fact that the way the suite was laid out meant there was no direct line of sight from the door to the beds. That made sleeping a lot safer. So much so I could actually sleep in one of the beds, not on the floor. Conrad was gazing wistfully out of the panorama windows. "Prague has hardly changed since I was last here. It's a miracle looking at what has happened to the rest of Europe."
"When were you last here?"
"1828. I was passing through when a family sickened after their dinner and eventually died. Their cook was accused of poisoning them, but I found they'd died of natural causes. Murine typhus. They'd been on a trip to the countryside and had been infected there, probably by fleas from a feral cat. The irony was that the disease went unrecognized because they were a wealthy family and people back then believed only the poor got typhus. The symptoms are a bit like arsenic poisoning so that's what the poor cook was supposed to have used. It didn't help that the police had beaten a confession out of her. Fortunately for her, two of the children developed the characteristic rash and people had to admit it was typhus. Before we got antibiotics, typhus was a killer."
Content with the room being secure, I'd already opened my wheelie suitcase and was getting the contents put away. There had been a time when I travelled with three pairs of jeans, three tops, three pairs of panties and my boots. Back then, the rest of my bag was filled with ammunition, magazines and a loading machine. Conrad had such a shock the first time he picked it up to carry for me. I know a man offering to carry a lady's baggage is an old-fashioned courtesy but it's one I really appreciate. Not because the bag is heavy but because I like having my hands free.
Now, it's different. I still have boxes of ammunition and magazines in my bag, but I also have a couple of business suits and other business-professional outfits. I was hanging them up in the wardrobe when I heard Conrad chuckling. "There was a time, Angel, when I used to have all the wardrobe space to myself."
"You know what the Russian Marines call that, don’t you? Toughski Shitski."
Conrad laughed and shook his head. "I was in the Mexican Marines; we called it El Tougho Shito."
I was looking at my clothes, deciding what to wear. It was much easier when I wore only black jeans, black nylon sweaters and cowboy boots. I picked out a black silk shirt that was decorated with red flowers and my charcoal-gray pinstripe business suit. That was suitable to this kind of meeting and had the virtue of being in the traditional black-and-red 14K Triad colors. I kept my cowboy boots though.
"How's this, Conrad?"
He looked over and nodded. "Very menacing. Catches the real you."
"Oh good. Ready to go down?" We were chuckling at that exchange all the way down to our meeting room.
The Bratva and the Společenství delegates were already there, waiting for us to appear. The police representatives wouldn't arrive for a half-hour or so. They knew very well that we were gangsters and there would be things we needed to discuss that it was better that they shouldn't know about. If you think relations between nuclear-armed powers require careful diplomacy, you haven't seen the song and dance that surrounds negotiations between the police and organized crime.
Russian gangsters come in two breeds. Some are balding, overweight and wear suits a shade too tight. They are the Suki, the bitches, although it is unwise for an outsider to use that name. Terminally unwise. They started their careers in crime and came up through the Russian prison system. The others are lean, dangerous men who come from the Russian Army, more precisely the Special Forces groups of that Army. They are well-dressed and elegant, but they exude ruthless competence. They are known as the Volki, the wolves. The leader of the Russians was a Volki, in late middle age with careful, watchful eyes that were constantly taking in what was happening. He saw me and suddenly those eyes lit up with joy. "Tovarish Angel! You have come far in the world, bratishka!"
"Vor Volkhov! How are you, Aleksandr Ignatyevich?" You might wonder why Aleksandr Ignatyevich Volkhov addressed me as 'brother'. Answer is simple, the Russian for 'sister' is 'sestra' but this is a form of address only used between women. Sasha and I are both members of the bratva, the brotherhood, so we use bratishka as a form of familiar address. And we are very old comrades.
He looked at me with an affectionate smile. "Old friend, may I?"
I nodded and braced myself. Sasha grabbed me in the traditional Russian bear-hug, but he made sure my arms were free and he kept it really brief. Even so, I could feel myself starting to go green.
"I have prospered." Sasha smiled. "As have you. It is hard to think that Brighton Beach was twenty-five years ago. The years have been very kind to you."
"Kinder than you might think, Sasha. May I introduce Conrad? He is my very special friend."
Another bear-hug. "Tovarish Conrad, you are an immensely fortunate man. I have heard about your exploits and how you solved the most perplexing of cases. We are most honored to have your assistance in this terrible affair."
"You are more than welcome tovarish Aleksandr Ignatyevich. This was a terrible crime indeed. I was reading the file on the way in. This has the odor of a revenge crime to me. The levels of brutality are far above those of a burglary gone wrong."
"I agree, tovarish Conrad." One of the Společenství had stepped forward. "I am Jaroslav Petržilka, head of the Společenství family here in Prague. This terrible affair has been a great shame upon us all and I thank you on behalf of all my brothers for coming to help us. And you, tovarish Angel."
Petržilka had obviously been briefed on etiquette because he didn’t attempt to touch me. He also guessed that Vor Volkhov and I have a very special relationship. One that started at Brighton Beach in 1984 when I had wiped out the better part of two SWAT teams in order to buy him the time, he needed to get the top leaders of the Bratva clear. From that event has grown the worldwide alliance between the Bratva and the Triads. A very profitable alliance for us all and it grew out of a 15 year-old girl and a 22 year-old man whom circumstances had forced into working together for their mutual benefit. There's a lesson there for you.
"We are pleased to be of assistance, Kolega Jaroslav. May I ask a question of fundamental importance? Did you have security guards on the house?"
"We did. Since the father was away, leaving his wife and children on their own, we had two guards present, a man and a woman. Both have disappeared. Normally there would have been a third and possibly a fourth."
All right, I don’t need to tell you that is very bad. When the security guards disappear in a case like this, they immediately become prime suspects. Either that or additional victims. I caught Conrad's eye and he gave me a slight nod. He'd picked up on the same detail. "Pan Petržilka, has the house been searched?"
"The police are doing so, yes. There is no trace of the guards. I know what you are thinking, and I must tell you that these two were trusted members of our family and known to us for some years. I think it unlikely they were involved but you are right. One can only be betrayed by somebody who is trusted absolutely. Anything else is just business. We cannot exclude the possibility yet."
Conrad started his normal process for interviewing people, commencing with innocuous questions and then digging in deeper. By the time he had finished, we had a reasonable picture of what had been happening, but the question was still why? The sheer level of violence in this particular crime seemed not to make any sense at all.
"What do you think, tovarish Angel?" Petržilka seemed anxious, doubtless fearing that I would be highly critical of his actions and that would harm his relationship with the Russians. He was on reasonably safe ground though. The key point is that Prague, and the Czech Republic in general, are relatively peaceful and situations like this are extremely rare. In fact, I can’t think of another case quite like it. There are places in the world where attacks like this happen worryingly frequently, but this is decidedly not one of them.
"Pan Petržilka, I can honestly see no fault in how you handled this. With hindsight, it might be possible to argue that having two guards on-scene was a little light but given the circumstances and background, it was appropriate. Your assessment of the level of threat and its direction was correct. I would recommend you reinforce the guard force you supply to other clients, if nothing else to reassure them that you are aware of their concern. You might well consider adding a K-9 team to the security force as well; a trained man with a trained dog is a dangerous adversary for any criminal. But what happened here is completely unexpected and that implies we are dealing with something we don't understand. Yet."
Conrad nodded in agreement. That was when a hotel employee came in. He spoke quietly to Vor Volkhov and left. "Bratishka, the police have arrived, and the hotel will be setting up the buffet now."
A team of porters arrived and set up a long table down one side of the room. While they were getting our meal and dining table ready, Volkhov went over to greet Colonel Kala and Captain Vernerova. We'd flipped a coin earlier and he'd lost. So, the Bratva were the official hosts. Kala was in a business suit, Vernerova in an evening dress. Once again, she was perfectly made-up and dressed but somehow looked as if she wasn't. I reflected on the fact I'd noticed that and decided Igrat was beginning to have an undue influence on me. Or was it Cristi? I'd have to ask Conrad that.
"Dámy a pánové, the Hotel Smetana welcomes you to our business buffet. We have a madeira-scented pheasant consomme with white bread dumplings, a wild boar broth with pumpkin puree, a ginger-infused lobster bisque or a salad with a selection of local farmer's cheeses." The maître de table stood proudly behind the display while his guests looked at the selection. He caught my eye and discretely pointed at the pheasant consommé. After we had returned to our table our choices were served to us and I found he had steered me to the perfect selection. Well, that is his job, isn't it.
By the time we had finished our soups, the main courses had arrived, been placed on the serving table and the staff discretely departed. We had the room to ourselves and that meant we could talk. What do cops and criminals talk about on social events? Business, of course. Imagine two sets of businessmen from rival companies at a dinner. I've told you this before, but it bears repeating. At a certain level, cops and villains share a lot of interests and in those cases, it serves us both to work together. Even when we're on opposite sides, it helps everybody if we treat each other with respect.
I'd picked out the braised veal cheeks with roasted potatoes and green peas. The meat had been cooked in a cream sauce and was beautiful. Conrad was tucking into a roasted loin of venison with chestnuts, shallots and spinach. He does like his venison and looked very, very happy. In fact, everybody did and so we had the makings of a very successful dinner party. That lasted through desert. Then, the staff returned, cleared the table and set up a series of cork boards for Conrad. It was time for him to sing for our supper and the mood switched from genial enjoyment to what was a very unpleasant business.
"We've both read the files on this case and the first place to start is to try and decide what is going on here." Conrad was standing in front of his corkboards with a pile of 8 by 5 inch cards and a set of colored pens to hand. It is a sort of tradition we have that the investigation of a case doesn't start until the first card gets pinned to the first board. Around the table, everybody was nodding in agreement. "The first obvious case is that some villains learned that Pavel Byrtus was away on business and assumed that he'd taken his family with them. They also assumed that his house would be empty and a ripe target for robbery. Byrtus is well-known to be a rich man so they assumed the pickings would be good. Only, the house wasn't empty. The thieves attacked the family, everything went out of control and spiraled down. Byrtus came home in the middle of the attack and they tried to kill him as well."
There was a lot of 'assumed' there and Conrad knew it. I kept quiet; one thing Conrad hates is having his train of thought interrupted. He carefully wrote 'robbery gone bad' on a card and pinned it to the center board. "There are several problems with this theory though. One of them is that a house like that is never really empty. There would have been servants there, even if the family was away. Do we have a list of the domestic staff?"
"A butler who was in charge of downstairs, two manservants, two maids and a cook." Lenka had the list to hand.
"Six people, all of whom have vanished. And we had the security staff, two people both of whom have vanished as well. That's a total of eleven people, twelve if we include Pavel Byrtus himself."
Conrad hesitated before continuing. "This wouldn’t be a robbery gone bad, this would be a massacre. Unless it was a large gang, it's hard to believe that nobody escaped. After all, the two security people alone would have been able to handle a small group while everybody else made a run for it."
"I assume the two guards were well-qualified?" Colonel Kala asked the question; I guessed that their identities weren't known to the police.
"The man was a veteran of Czech Army special forces, the woman a martial arts expert and provider of self-defense training for women." Petržilka saw me wince slightly and knew what I was thinking. "I know, but gun-chicks are rare here."
One of the problems in the world is that martial arts experts have greatly inflated ideas about their own capabilities. Mostly, they have seen too many films that feature extensive wire-work and assume they can do the same without the wires. Truth is, martial arts training usually just means people get overconfident and don't understand when they are out of their depth. Then they die while they should be doing something useful like running away. Sasha caught my eye and shook his head slightly. I had little doubt that Petržilka would be getting the concept of hiring outside help explained to him.
"There is another problem." Conrad hadn't quite finished with the idea of a robbery gone bad. "One of the many things Angel has taught me is that a caper needs to be completed fast. Get in, do the job, get out. If the Byrtus family had been mixed up in this by chance, they'd have been killed as fast as possible. Shot, stabbed, strangled, whatever would slow the pursuit of the real criminal enterprise down least. Yet the victims here took hours to die. The methodology does not fit the explanation for the crime."
"It might, if the victims were being tortured for the location of the valuables." Lenka had a point there.
"If they had, it would have been over in a few minutes. Jana Byrtus would have given away the information to save her children. Any mother would." Conrad also had a point and it was a comprehensive answer to Lenka's. "It's just possible she didn’t, which is why we can keep the card on the board, but I would rank this as a very unlikely scenario. Angel?"
"Agreed, possible but very unlikely." In case you are wondering, Conrad was genuinely asking me to confirm his opinion. This might surprise you, but we don’t always agree, and we do have blazing rows now and then. First time it happened, he was genuinely scared of me, but those days are long gone. Now when we fight over something, once it's done, it's done. Usually, we then sit in studied silence for an hour or so until we both burst out laughing. Then we make up over dinner. My agreement with him this time was also genuine. A robbery gone wrong had too many negatives for my taste. Taking down a house like that including two security guards was a professional job and professionals don’t torture people for jollies. It suddenly occurred to me that this argument wouldn’t stand if the attackers weren't professionals.
"Next possibility. Defaulting on a loan-shark?" Everybody shook their heads at that. The police had run a legal credit check, we'd run illegal ones, and nobody had come up with any hint that the Byrtus family was in corporate or personal debt. They had lots of liquid family reserves and the company was cash-rich to an almost embarrassing degree. In any case, one can't recover debts from a corpse. In any case, if this was a debt recovery exercise, it would have taken place when Byrtus was present, not in his absence.
I'll trim down the detail on what happened for the next four hours. Essentially, people thought up possible scenarios for the crime and everybody gave their opinions that supported or undermined those scenarios. Eventually, we'd decide how probable the concept was. Highly unlikely on the extreme right, plausible on the left. At the end of that four hours we had only come up with on plausible scenario. Revenge. Note that this was a conclusion Conrad and I had come up with hours earlier. Damn, we're good.
"Conrad, revenge looks the most likely motivation here. Left hand side. Now, why? Money, sex, past wrongs or covering up a crime?"
Those are the four classic motivations for murder. I had a worrying feeling we were about to find a fifth.
"The extreme violence and viciousness of these killings seems to point that way. I'd suggest that the attackers knew Byrtus was away and assumed that they'd have time to do what they intended and leave Byrtus to find the bodies of his family. Only, he arrived early so they simply killed him along with the rest. If this is correct, the bodies of the security guards are somewhere near at hand. Probably buried on the grounds or adjacent to them. The servants, if they aren’t involved, then the same. We need to do a thorough check"
"There's a lot of ground out there. Searching it would take weeks." Sasha looked at me. "Angel, what are you up to? I know that grin."
"Just that there is somebody I know who owes me a big favor, has an all-terrain utility vehicle equipped with a ground-penetrating radar and is a trained archeologist. And, Pan Petržilka, bringing in a British expert will help show how seriously you take this.
"Please, call me Jarek. A radar system like that will be of great value, will it not Colonel?"
"It will indeed. We need to find those bodies. Or be sure they are not there." Kala was obviously not yet convinced that the two security guards were not involved. To be honest, nor was I. "I have looked at ground-penetrating radar with longing in my heart ever since the systems were first marketed. Sadly our budget . . . ."
I handed him one of my Worldwares Trading business cards. "Talk to me. We may be able to fix things for you."
All right, here's how it's done. The world leader in making ground-penetrating radars is an American company called L-5. That company licenses out its technology to an Indian group in which the 14K has an interest. Now, China also produces an unlicensed copy of the L-5 equipment, but they can’t sell it anywhere because it is unlicensed. Even though the American and Chinese equipment are so identical it would take an expert hours to spot the difference. Intellectual Property Rights and all that. So, we buy the Chinese version at a fifth of the price of producing an American one, switch the labels, serial numbers and manufacturer's plates over and sell it at regular prices. A lot bigger profit margin results. If L-5 check up on the sale, the plate leads them straight back to the licensed Indian producer who has all the properly-authentic documentation. Is that neat or what? We do the same with all sorts of things. Multiplying the profit margin on a rivet by five doesn't sound much but when there are tens of millions of them sold every day? This kind of product forgery is beginning to make us as much money as Ai's computer fraud. All goes to prove one can always find a way to generate income if one looks for it.
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Three
Kladruby Heliport, Kladruby, 90 miles south of Prague
Until quite recently, we couldn’t fly directly from London to here. Flying over what was left of Germany was forbidden on safety grounds so aircraft had to either go east over the Baltic and Poland or west over France, then Switzerland and Austria. Either route meant an extra refueling stop for a Rotodyne or using an airliner. A couple of years back, the restriction was lifted and now it is possible to fly from London to Prague with only a single stop at the Roermond Rotodyne Hub in the Netherlands. That makes intra-European travel a lot easier.
We'd got lucky in another way. I called Penny Sexton at the University of Lincolnshire and she'd told us that their archeology team was scheduled to assist in the exploration of a major complex of 8th century fortifications at Bojna in Slovakia. By advancing their travel schedule a few days, they'd be able to help us out before going on to the Slovakian dig. That meant we would have a proper archeology dig team here and that could make a big difference. So, a mixed convoy of Russian, Czech and Chinese gangsters, plus the Czech police investigation team they were assisting, had driven down to Kladruby while we were waiting for the Lincolnshire University archeology team to arrive by 'Dyne. Now if that isn't a surreal picture, nothing is.
I'm beginning to think that this case comes, somehow, from a division in the Czech Republic that causes big political problems. The further south and west somebody lives, the wealthier they are likely to be. After the Big One dropped nuclear weapons all over Germany, the fallout went south and east. Czechoslovakia was in its path and the whole country was hit to some extent as a result. The south-western part was least affected and most quickly cleaned up. Slovakia was shielded by the Alps and the Carpathians and was hardly affected at all. The fallout problems have faded now, mostly, but rich people in the Czech Republic still prefer south and west. That made people living in the north and east resentful. Pavel Byrtus had been comfortably rich and it had suddenly occurred to me that meant he could be a focus for that resentment.
That train of thought was interrupted by a text message from British European Airways. Rotodyne Flight BEA872 would be making a special-request landing at the landing ground just south of the city in 15 minutes. We were already on scene so the meet-up was no problem. Sasha had looked after the booking and paid the exorbitant fee that rotodyne operators charged for special landings. Well, I thought it was exorbitant, but everybody knows I squeeze dimes until the Indian mounts the buffalo.
The 'Dyne came into land on time, touched down by the main building and dropped its tail ramp. Raw Eddie's all-terrain vehicle drove off, followed by four familiar figures. The cargo master parked the ATV, disappeared back into his aircraft and retracted the ramp. As soon as it was secure, the 'Dyne took off for Vienna.
"Hey, Angel!" Hardly Phil, Sexy Penny, and Misty Prema had seen our limousines approaching and were running over to see us. Raw Eddie couldn’t run of course but he was mounting his ATV and would drive over. We had a trailer for that vehicle behind a Police Force Landrover. Actually, the license-built Czech copy of a Landrover, a UAZ-469. I couldn't help feeling the tiny heliport was getting crowded.
"Yo, Penny!" I waved her group over and started the process of getting everybody introduced. Conrad took over; he has a much better appreciation of social niceties than I do. Then, he couldn’t very well have less. Our party was getting unwieldy now, fourteen people in all with another two dozen waiting for us at the Byrtus Estate. Up on the trailer, Colonel Kala was looking at the radar-equipped ATV with acute longing in his eyes. Raw Eddie was in his element, answering questions about the systems performance and how it was used. Kala was particularly interested in how deep the radar would scan. Eddie told him that it depended on soil conditions but provided those were good, the radar would penetrate about two meters. I didn't like the sound of that; it could mean that we would have to start burying bodies deeper. I still have my friendly piggies though, even if they do tend to be donated to a police charity fund-raiser afterwards.
Byrtus Estate, Kladruby, 90 miles south of Prague
"This is the second time this month we've been able to speak with people who were directly involved in the events we are digging up." Penny was watching the team set up the guidelines for the dig. Prema had been talking with Sasha and myself about the best places to start the search. Meanwhile, Phil and Eddy were getting the ATV ready and its radar checked out. It's a cute little vehicle, a diesel-electric hybrid. Apparently, the radar used a lot of juice, so the vehicle had to have a powerful generator anyway and somebody came up with the bright idea of using the capacity to charge batteries for an electric motor.
"How is everything going back at the center?"
"Very well. Your security team have proved a great success. At first there was a lot of opposition to having armed guards on campus, people complained they would throw their weight around and so on, but we hardly know they are there until we need them. Then one of the students dumped his boyfriend and the ex-partner broke in to get him. Your people spotted the intruder and detained him before he could do any harm. That converted everybody but the die-hard 'guns are ebil' brigade. The castle excavation is going well also. We got a massive donation from a Welsh mining company; they'd just been taken over by an American group who wanted to show they would be good corporate citizens. The site's been dug now and we're restoring it and building a dome for the indoor areas so that it can be a living museum. We've got a list of volunteers who will be resident in the outdoor areas for three or six months at a time. Counts as field work for their base-line degree."
"Good idea. You said you had a dig where you had eyewitnesses?" Don’t think by the way I'm interested in all this, but Conrad told me that it was polite to show interest in people's lives. Also, they might let things slip while chatting. Most people do. I didn’t mention that the big dig going on at the Flavian Amphitheater was being aided by Achillea. Especially, I didn’t add that her primary qualification for doing so was that she had fought in the arena there.
"We were asked to do a dig in London, place called Shoreditch Park. It used to be a mass of small, low-income housing but it really got pounded in 1947. Corsairs and Skyraiders did the job of course, they came in over the rooftops and turned what had been a community into a mass of smoking wreckage. Nobody is quite sure why, finding out was one object of the dig, but the damage was so bad the government just turned the area into a park instead of trying to rebuild. Anyway, there was a big project to explore the ruins and we were part of it. Made a good Archeology in Action special. Thing was a lot of people who had lived there and fled during the air attack came back to look at what we were finding and told us what that day was like. We were actually excavating one house when the lady who had lived there turned up and showed us where everything had been. Halfway through, we found a badly-damaged doll she recognized as her sister's."
"Could be risky, digging at a bombsite."
"Tell us about it. We found an unexploded thousand pound bomb. A police car fled the scene with lights and sirens on but Eddie overtook it in his ATV. That would have been impressive if Phil hadn't streaked past them both on a bicycle. Once we stopped running away, Army engineers got rid of it for us. Ah, they're set up. Here they go."
Raw Eddie had a marked-out strip of ground, one that us villains had picked out as where we would be likely to bury a surplus body or three. He had been about to start his search pattern when Lenka came over and started the puppy-dog eyes bit. Eddie, ever the gentleman, waved her into the front seat, showed her what to look for on the screen and was soon driving his ATV parallel to the long side. When he reached the end, they turned around and came back so that the new swathe partially overlapped the first. Eventually, when the whole area had been covered, he stopped and started to print out the results. I walked over to see what the radar had revealed. I was interested on several levels of course.
"Anything show up?" Phil, Mad Tom and Conrad were gathered around the ATV, inspecting a print-out. The vehicle was fitted with a small printer for an immediate results feed while the full data was downloaded to a small stick-like thing. Eddie was working on that, making sure it was properly labelled with location, time and date. Once it was done, he gave it to Lenka for safe keeping while he made a second copy for the local Czech Police.
"Ooh, thar be a wahl heah." I'd forgotten how thick Phil's accent was. And how big his hands were; a big meaty finger was pointing at a clearly defined black line across the print-out, almost perpendicular to the long axis of the search area. "Too shahply defaahned fah a field wahl, thah was ah bahldin heah once."
"No trace of bodies?" Colonel Kala was looking at the radar image with longing. I'd already been in touch with Koi and arranged for a brochure on the allegedly Indian-made version to be sent to him. We'd give him the law-and-order discount and very reasonable payment terms.
"Naht ah wahn." In the background, Conrad was translating Phil's Cornish accent for the Russians and Czechs, I could see they were seriously grateful. The next order of business was to mark out another search area for Eddie to scan. Sasha and Jarek had taken their suit jackets off, exposing their own pistols in the process of course and were helping get the next search area set up. Their minions were trying to curry favor with their bosses by joining in as well. As a result, the next area was marked off in record time. Meanwhile, Prema and Phil were getting more interested in the building we'd found.
"It predates the house over there. Must do, the trees around it here post-date it while they pre-date the present house." Prema straightened up and pushed her hair back. "You know, Colonel, we may have a real architectural site here. Your country is a bit short on history, perhaps we can find some for you?"
"I'll have you know we have found evidence of prehistoric human settlements in the old Bohemia area, dating back to the Paleolithic era. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice, together with a few other finds from nearby locations, is the oldest known ceramic article in the world!" Colonel Kala was indignant until he caught the twinkle of laughter in Prema's eyes and realized she was goading him. It's an occupational hazard when Prema's around; she chased me around the Washingborough dig site once. I'll tell you that story some other time.
It took four searches before we got our first hit. Eddie had the print-out of the search area and he didn’t hesitate. "Been recent digging here; you can see where the surface layer has been broken and there are two bodies down below. See one here and the other a bit further along? They're not that deep down."
Penny was looking at the chart. "Prema can you check the ground where you are standing please?"
Prema had a rod and stuck it in. "Soft and disturbed, Penny. I'd say recently dug up. Do you want us to start excavating?"
Colonel Kala shook his head. "We must have that done by a Police forensic team. I have one on call."
"Can you ask them to bring in some more diesel fuel please? I couldn't bring much on the 'Dyne and we're getting a bit low here." Kala gave him a 'thumbs up'. "Great, I've got enough left in the tank for two more areas. Where next?"
By the time we had hit the next contact, the forensics team had turned up, Eddie had his next load of diesel and we all had a chance to sit down for a late lunch. By the time we restarted work, we had confirmation that there were two bodies in the first site, a man and a woman. The pathologist was unwilling to commit himself to cause of death although the bullet hole in the head of the man was a firm pointer that it wasn't natural causes. Sasha was kind enough to point out that the fact it was a single bullet hole made it clear I hadn’t done it. The cause of the woman's death wasn't immediately obvious although obvious bruising to the face suggested she'd been beaten. Whether it had been in a fight or something else wasn’t so clear.
It had taken two stages for Eddie to identify the second burial site. It was a largish pit, the edges between disturbed and undisturbed ground clearly visible. His first part had just caught the edge of the pit, so he had gone back and done a secondary scan that covered the whole thing. It was confusing, the edges of the pit were clearly visible, but the inside was a confused mass. We found out why when the forensic team, supported by the archeologists, dug up the remains. The first thing they hit when they dug down was blackened soil that Prema immediately identified as burn residue. A bit lower down, we found the bodies of four members of staff, all tangled up together. Once again, the pathologist refused to say what had been the cause of death without a proper autopsy. I didn’t need to be told, the contorted bodies and the smell of gasoline made it obvious. Four of the six household staff had been put in the pit, gasoline thrown over them and then they had been burned, probably while still alive. At some point, the pit had then been filled in. That left one obvious question. What had happened to the other two?
Forest near the Byrtus Estate, Kladruby
We all carry the tools of our trade. I always have my boys, Sasha and Jarek have their pistols as well. Their minions are armed according to their personal preferences. Daniel and Lenka have their handcuffs, radios, notebooks and so on. Conrad always has a case containing an emergency communion kit although he has used it to carry my boys now and then. Anyway, we had got the bodies out of their graves and Conrad had set up a service for them. We had identified the first two we had found. As we had suspected, one was Ladislav Fischer, previously a sergeant in the Czech special forces and more recently a professional bodyguard on retainer to the Společenství. The bullet that had killed him had taken him dead center in the back of the head, exiting through his forehead. My guess was that it had been fired from a distance and he'd never known what had hit him. The woman was Monika Palová, a martial arts instructor who also doubled as a bodyguard on retainer to the Společenství. She'd been shot in the leg before being killed. We'd know more about what had happened to her after the formal autopsy, but I was reasonably certain that when faced with the attack, she'd tried to fight the attackers with 'martial arts'. They'd ignored her stylized 'moves', simply crippled her with the leg-shot and then beaten or strangled her to death. Bringing a knife to a gunfight is stupid. Bringing bare hands is incredibly so. Even Achillea, who is the best unarmed combat person I have ever met, won’t do that unless she knows she can start within a few feet of her opposition.
The other four were different; they were so badly burned that their bodies were unrecognizable. So much so, it was impossible at this point, even to determine the gender of the victims. All six bodies had been lined up, covered with a sheet each and Conrad had read a last-rites mass for them. We'd used the headlights on the vehicles to provide lighting while the attendees simply sat on the ground. For all its improvised nature, it was a surprisingly impressive ceremony and it had an unintended side-effect. Well, unintended and unexpected by me. I'm not so sure about Conrad; he has a habit of pulling unexpected but very useful things out of a hat. It turned out that the Russians and Czech gangsters took their religions as seriously as the Czech police did, which is to say a lot. So, by the time the service was over, what had been three separate groups had consolidated into a single entity. Me? While everybody else was taking part in the service, I kept my eyes open for any developing threat. There was a bad situation here and every warning sense I have was working overtime.
"Nice service Conrad." He had finished his mass, cleared up and come over to join me.
"Thank you, Angel. We got everybody on the same page at last." Told you. Conrad's pulled an idea out of a hat again. "It drives something home though. We only know who a proportion of the dead are. It will be a miracle if we can identify the burn victims positively. With that level of burn damage, we probably won't even get DNA data.”
I thought that over. "The two security guards and Jana Byrtus are easily recognizable. It's the two children and the household staff who are burned beyond easy identification."
Conrad sounded very thoughtful. "Jana Byrtus bled to death from extensive knife cuts all over her body and she had been crucified into the bargain. She died when blood loss had weakened her to the point where her legs couldn’t support her any more. Obviously, the objective was to make her suffer, so why didn’t they burn her as well? And Pavel Byrtus? They just pounded him with the traditional blunt object and threw him down the stairs to the cellar. Doesn't it seem likely to you that nobody involved in the killings cared whether those four were identified or not? But they did care whether the household staff or the children were identified. We have eight people missing and six unidentified, possibly unidentifiable, bodies. Doesn't that rather sound like a concerted effort to make certain we could not determine which of the eight missing people are not included in the six corpses we found?"
Kladruby Police Station, Striebska Street, Kladruby
Accommodation was a serious problem in Kladruby that night. There were three hotels in the town and the surrounding villages, but they were all small guest-houses with single-digit numbers of rooms. Sexy Penny and the rest of the archeological team had their camping gear and they'd stayed at the site along with a strong detachment of local and national police who were guarding the scene of the massacre. More national police were staying in the police station, sleeping in the cells which had led to an exchange of 'professional' jokes between them and the representatives of the Bratva and the Společenství. Since Conrad and I had flown in from Bangkok to help with the investigation, we had been assigned the bridal suite in the only real hotel in the area. That caused more professional jokes, some of which made Conrad flush bright red. If this case wasn't evolving into a major and very unpleasant massacre, I'd have said we were turning into a really friendly group.
"They're all so young." Conrad was looking at the corkboard to which he had pinned pictures of the eight missing people. He was right of course; the cook and the butler were the oldest of the group but that meant they were late-twenties rather than late teens.
"They would be." Lenka was looking at the group with tears in her eyes. To be honest, she was being the most demonstrative of the group but almost everybody was affected by the line of pictures. I was the exception of course. To me, the only important thing was that all the evidence we had suggested that two of those people had killed the rest. "Working as domestic staff is a typical entry-level job for teenagers who won’t be going on to University. We have a labor shortage in Czechia so two or three years in service ending with a good reference will get a youth started off right. It could be five or six years before a university graduate salary overtakes them. If they do. School-leavers think long and hard about whether a University degree is a good investment or whether they should go straight to work. It's probably the first adult decision they make."
Conrad had noticed something else. "The younger ones are all fairly similar in body type. Hair color and eye color are gone of course. Will we be able to pick up the two older ones? If they are there, of course.
"We might" The Senior Pathologist, Dr. Karel Holub, looked very thoughtful. "I won’t promise it but there are a number of things that might have survived the burning. We could probably present the data as percentages. This one has a twenty percent chance of being one of the older pair, this one a forty percent chance. That's likely to be the best we can do. Remember, we are having problems confirming gender. We'll have to go to bone structure for that."
"It would help a lot. If the older pair aren’t there, that would make it likely they did it. If they are, that would cut the suspects down to two out of four." Lenka didn't really sound that convinced which was a good thing because she'd just made a serious mistake. I pointed it out so that Conrad wouldn’t have to.
"Two out of six, Lenka. Remember the two Byrtus children. They were, or maybe are, sixteen and seventeen. That puts them in the younger age group as well. They might be in there. Or they might not."
Lenka went completely white as she remembered the autopsy results in the file on Jana Byrtus and her mind jumped to the obvious conclusion. "Oh, dear God."
Kladruby Heliport, Kladruby, 90 miles south of Prague
Until quite recently, we couldn’t fly directly from London to here. Flying over what was left of Germany was forbidden on safety grounds so aircraft had to either go east over the Baltic and Poland or west over France, then Switzerland and Austria. Either route meant an extra refueling stop for a Rotodyne or using an airliner. A couple of years back, the restriction was lifted and now it is possible to fly from London to Prague with only a single stop at the Roermond Rotodyne Hub in the Netherlands. That makes intra-European travel a lot easier.
We'd got lucky in another way. I called Penny Sexton at the University of Lincolnshire and she'd told us that their archeology team was scheduled to assist in the exploration of a major complex of 8th century fortifications at Bojna in Slovakia. By advancing their travel schedule a few days, they'd be able to help us out before going on to the Slovakian dig. That meant we would have a proper archeology dig team here and that could make a big difference. So, a mixed convoy of Russian, Czech and Chinese gangsters, plus the Czech police investigation team they were assisting, had driven down to Kladruby while we were waiting for the Lincolnshire University archeology team to arrive by 'Dyne. Now if that isn't a surreal picture, nothing is.
I'm beginning to think that this case comes, somehow, from a division in the Czech Republic that causes big political problems. The further south and west somebody lives, the wealthier they are likely to be. After the Big One dropped nuclear weapons all over Germany, the fallout went south and east. Czechoslovakia was in its path and the whole country was hit to some extent as a result. The south-western part was least affected and most quickly cleaned up. Slovakia was shielded by the Alps and the Carpathians and was hardly affected at all. The fallout problems have faded now, mostly, but rich people in the Czech Republic still prefer south and west. That made people living in the north and east resentful. Pavel Byrtus had been comfortably rich and it had suddenly occurred to me that meant he could be a focus for that resentment.
That train of thought was interrupted by a text message from British European Airways. Rotodyne Flight BEA872 would be making a special-request landing at the landing ground just south of the city in 15 minutes. We were already on scene so the meet-up was no problem. Sasha had looked after the booking and paid the exorbitant fee that rotodyne operators charged for special landings. Well, I thought it was exorbitant, but everybody knows I squeeze dimes until the Indian mounts the buffalo.
The 'Dyne came into land on time, touched down by the main building and dropped its tail ramp. Raw Eddie's all-terrain vehicle drove off, followed by four familiar figures. The cargo master parked the ATV, disappeared back into his aircraft and retracted the ramp. As soon as it was secure, the 'Dyne took off for Vienna.
"Hey, Angel!" Hardly Phil, Sexy Penny, and Misty Prema had seen our limousines approaching and were running over to see us. Raw Eddie couldn’t run of course but he was mounting his ATV and would drive over. We had a trailer for that vehicle behind a Police Force Landrover. Actually, the license-built Czech copy of a Landrover, a UAZ-469. I couldn't help feeling the tiny heliport was getting crowded.
"Yo, Penny!" I waved her group over and started the process of getting everybody introduced. Conrad took over; he has a much better appreciation of social niceties than I do. Then, he couldn’t very well have less. Our party was getting unwieldy now, fourteen people in all with another two dozen waiting for us at the Byrtus Estate. Up on the trailer, Colonel Kala was looking at the radar-equipped ATV with acute longing in his eyes. Raw Eddie was in his element, answering questions about the systems performance and how it was used. Kala was particularly interested in how deep the radar would scan. Eddie told him that it depended on soil conditions but provided those were good, the radar would penetrate about two meters. I didn't like the sound of that; it could mean that we would have to start burying bodies deeper. I still have my friendly piggies though, even if they do tend to be donated to a police charity fund-raiser afterwards.
Byrtus Estate, Kladruby, 90 miles south of Prague
"This is the second time this month we've been able to speak with people who were directly involved in the events we are digging up." Penny was watching the team set up the guidelines for the dig. Prema had been talking with Sasha and myself about the best places to start the search. Meanwhile, Phil and Eddy were getting the ATV ready and its radar checked out. It's a cute little vehicle, a diesel-electric hybrid. Apparently, the radar used a lot of juice, so the vehicle had to have a powerful generator anyway and somebody came up with the bright idea of using the capacity to charge batteries for an electric motor.
"How is everything going back at the center?"
"Very well. Your security team have proved a great success. At first there was a lot of opposition to having armed guards on campus, people complained they would throw their weight around and so on, but we hardly know they are there until we need them. Then one of the students dumped his boyfriend and the ex-partner broke in to get him. Your people spotted the intruder and detained him before he could do any harm. That converted everybody but the die-hard 'guns are ebil' brigade. The castle excavation is going well also. We got a massive donation from a Welsh mining company; they'd just been taken over by an American group who wanted to show they would be good corporate citizens. The site's been dug now and we're restoring it and building a dome for the indoor areas so that it can be a living museum. We've got a list of volunteers who will be resident in the outdoor areas for three or six months at a time. Counts as field work for their base-line degree."
"Good idea. You said you had a dig where you had eyewitnesses?" Don’t think by the way I'm interested in all this, but Conrad told me that it was polite to show interest in people's lives. Also, they might let things slip while chatting. Most people do. I didn’t mention that the big dig going on at the Flavian Amphitheater was being aided by Achillea. Especially, I didn’t add that her primary qualification for doing so was that she had fought in the arena there.
"We were asked to do a dig in London, place called Shoreditch Park. It used to be a mass of small, low-income housing but it really got pounded in 1947. Corsairs and Skyraiders did the job of course, they came in over the rooftops and turned what had been a community into a mass of smoking wreckage. Nobody is quite sure why, finding out was one object of the dig, but the damage was so bad the government just turned the area into a park instead of trying to rebuild. Anyway, there was a big project to explore the ruins and we were part of it. Made a good Archeology in Action special. Thing was a lot of people who had lived there and fled during the air attack came back to look at what we were finding and told us what that day was like. We were actually excavating one house when the lady who had lived there turned up and showed us where everything had been. Halfway through, we found a badly-damaged doll she recognized as her sister's."
"Could be risky, digging at a bombsite."
"Tell us about it. We found an unexploded thousand pound bomb. A police car fled the scene with lights and sirens on but Eddie overtook it in his ATV. That would have been impressive if Phil hadn't streaked past them both on a bicycle. Once we stopped running away, Army engineers got rid of it for us. Ah, they're set up. Here they go."
Raw Eddie had a marked-out strip of ground, one that us villains had picked out as where we would be likely to bury a surplus body or three. He had been about to start his search pattern when Lenka came over and started the puppy-dog eyes bit. Eddie, ever the gentleman, waved her into the front seat, showed her what to look for on the screen and was soon driving his ATV parallel to the long side. When he reached the end, they turned around and came back so that the new swathe partially overlapped the first. Eventually, when the whole area had been covered, he stopped and started to print out the results. I walked over to see what the radar had revealed. I was interested on several levels of course.
"Anything show up?" Phil, Mad Tom and Conrad were gathered around the ATV, inspecting a print-out. The vehicle was fitted with a small printer for an immediate results feed while the full data was downloaded to a small stick-like thing. Eddie was working on that, making sure it was properly labelled with location, time and date. Once it was done, he gave it to Lenka for safe keeping while he made a second copy for the local Czech Police.
"Ooh, thar be a wahl heah." I'd forgotten how thick Phil's accent was. And how big his hands were; a big meaty finger was pointing at a clearly defined black line across the print-out, almost perpendicular to the long axis of the search area. "Too shahply defaahned fah a field wahl, thah was ah bahldin heah once."
"No trace of bodies?" Colonel Kala was looking at the radar image with longing. I'd already been in touch with Koi and arranged for a brochure on the allegedly Indian-made version to be sent to him. We'd give him the law-and-order discount and very reasonable payment terms.
"Naht ah wahn." In the background, Conrad was translating Phil's Cornish accent for the Russians and Czechs, I could see they were seriously grateful. The next order of business was to mark out another search area for Eddie to scan. Sasha and Jarek had taken their suit jackets off, exposing their own pistols in the process of course and were helping get the next search area set up. Their minions were trying to curry favor with their bosses by joining in as well. As a result, the next area was marked off in record time. Meanwhile, Prema and Phil were getting more interested in the building we'd found.
"It predates the house over there. Must do, the trees around it here post-date it while they pre-date the present house." Prema straightened up and pushed her hair back. "You know, Colonel, we may have a real architectural site here. Your country is a bit short on history, perhaps we can find some for you?"
"I'll have you know we have found evidence of prehistoric human settlements in the old Bohemia area, dating back to the Paleolithic era. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice, together with a few other finds from nearby locations, is the oldest known ceramic article in the world!" Colonel Kala was indignant until he caught the twinkle of laughter in Prema's eyes and realized she was goading him. It's an occupational hazard when Prema's around; she chased me around the Washingborough dig site once. I'll tell you that story some other time.
It took four searches before we got our first hit. Eddie had the print-out of the search area and he didn’t hesitate. "Been recent digging here; you can see where the surface layer has been broken and there are two bodies down below. See one here and the other a bit further along? They're not that deep down."
Penny was looking at the chart. "Prema can you check the ground where you are standing please?"
Prema had a rod and stuck it in. "Soft and disturbed, Penny. I'd say recently dug up. Do you want us to start excavating?"
Colonel Kala shook his head. "We must have that done by a Police forensic team. I have one on call."
"Can you ask them to bring in some more diesel fuel please? I couldn't bring much on the 'Dyne and we're getting a bit low here." Kala gave him a 'thumbs up'. "Great, I've got enough left in the tank for two more areas. Where next?"
By the time we had hit the next contact, the forensics team had turned up, Eddie had his next load of diesel and we all had a chance to sit down for a late lunch. By the time we restarted work, we had confirmation that there were two bodies in the first site, a man and a woman. The pathologist was unwilling to commit himself to cause of death although the bullet hole in the head of the man was a firm pointer that it wasn't natural causes. Sasha was kind enough to point out that the fact it was a single bullet hole made it clear I hadn’t done it. The cause of the woman's death wasn't immediately obvious although obvious bruising to the face suggested she'd been beaten. Whether it had been in a fight or something else wasn’t so clear.
It had taken two stages for Eddie to identify the second burial site. It was a largish pit, the edges between disturbed and undisturbed ground clearly visible. His first part had just caught the edge of the pit, so he had gone back and done a secondary scan that covered the whole thing. It was confusing, the edges of the pit were clearly visible, but the inside was a confused mass. We found out why when the forensic team, supported by the archeologists, dug up the remains. The first thing they hit when they dug down was blackened soil that Prema immediately identified as burn residue. A bit lower down, we found the bodies of four members of staff, all tangled up together. Once again, the pathologist refused to say what had been the cause of death without a proper autopsy. I didn’t need to be told, the contorted bodies and the smell of gasoline made it obvious. Four of the six household staff had been put in the pit, gasoline thrown over them and then they had been burned, probably while still alive. At some point, the pit had then been filled in. That left one obvious question. What had happened to the other two?
Forest near the Byrtus Estate, Kladruby
We all carry the tools of our trade. I always have my boys, Sasha and Jarek have their pistols as well. Their minions are armed according to their personal preferences. Daniel and Lenka have their handcuffs, radios, notebooks and so on. Conrad always has a case containing an emergency communion kit although he has used it to carry my boys now and then. Anyway, we had got the bodies out of their graves and Conrad had set up a service for them. We had identified the first two we had found. As we had suspected, one was Ladislav Fischer, previously a sergeant in the Czech special forces and more recently a professional bodyguard on retainer to the Společenství. The bullet that had killed him had taken him dead center in the back of the head, exiting through his forehead. My guess was that it had been fired from a distance and he'd never known what had hit him. The woman was Monika Palová, a martial arts instructor who also doubled as a bodyguard on retainer to the Společenství. She'd been shot in the leg before being killed. We'd know more about what had happened to her after the formal autopsy, but I was reasonably certain that when faced with the attack, she'd tried to fight the attackers with 'martial arts'. They'd ignored her stylized 'moves', simply crippled her with the leg-shot and then beaten or strangled her to death. Bringing a knife to a gunfight is stupid. Bringing bare hands is incredibly so. Even Achillea, who is the best unarmed combat person I have ever met, won’t do that unless she knows she can start within a few feet of her opposition.
The other four were different; they were so badly burned that their bodies were unrecognizable. So much so, it was impossible at this point, even to determine the gender of the victims. All six bodies had been lined up, covered with a sheet each and Conrad had read a last-rites mass for them. We'd used the headlights on the vehicles to provide lighting while the attendees simply sat on the ground. For all its improvised nature, it was a surprisingly impressive ceremony and it had an unintended side-effect. Well, unintended and unexpected by me. I'm not so sure about Conrad; he has a habit of pulling unexpected but very useful things out of a hat. It turned out that the Russians and Czech gangsters took their religions as seriously as the Czech police did, which is to say a lot. So, by the time the service was over, what had been three separate groups had consolidated into a single entity. Me? While everybody else was taking part in the service, I kept my eyes open for any developing threat. There was a bad situation here and every warning sense I have was working overtime.
"Nice service Conrad." He had finished his mass, cleared up and come over to join me.
"Thank you, Angel. We got everybody on the same page at last." Told you. Conrad's pulled an idea out of a hat again. "It drives something home though. We only know who a proportion of the dead are. It will be a miracle if we can identify the burn victims positively. With that level of burn damage, we probably won't even get DNA data.”
I thought that over. "The two security guards and Jana Byrtus are easily recognizable. It's the two children and the household staff who are burned beyond easy identification."
Conrad sounded very thoughtful. "Jana Byrtus bled to death from extensive knife cuts all over her body and she had been crucified into the bargain. She died when blood loss had weakened her to the point where her legs couldn’t support her any more. Obviously, the objective was to make her suffer, so why didn’t they burn her as well? And Pavel Byrtus? They just pounded him with the traditional blunt object and threw him down the stairs to the cellar. Doesn't it seem likely to you that nobody involved in the killings cared whether those four were identified or not? But they did care whether the household staff or the children were identified. We have eight people missing and six unidentified, possibly unidentifiable, bodies. Doesn't that rather sound like a concerted effort to make certain we could not determine which of the eight missing people are not included in the six corpses we found?"
Kladruby Police Station, Striebska Street, Kladruby
Accommodation was a serious problem in Kladruby that night. There were three hotels in the town and the surrounding villages, but they were all small guest-houses with single-digit numbers of rooms. Sexy Penny and the rest of the archeological team had their camping gear and they'd stayed at the site along with a strong detachment of local and national police who were guarding the scene of the massacre. More national police were staying in the police station, sleeping in the cells which had led to an exchange of 'professional' jokes between them and the representatives of the Bratva and the Společenství. Since Conrad and I had flown in from Bangkok to help with the investigation, we had been assigned the bridal suite in the only real hotel in the area. That caused more professional jokes, some of which made Conrad flush bright red. If this case wasn't evolving into a major and very unpleasant massacre, I'd have said we were turning into a really friendly group.
"They're all so young." Conrad was looking at the corkboard to which he had pinned pictures of the eight missing people. He was right of course; the cook and the butler were the oldest of the group but that meant they were late-twenties rather than late teens.
"They would be." Lenka was looking at the group with tears in her eyes. To be honest, she was being the most demonstrative of the group but almost everybody was affected by the line of pictures. I was the exception of course. To me, the only important thing was that all the evidence we had suggested that two of those people had killed the rest. "Working as domestic staff is a typical entry-level job for teenagers who won’t be going on to University. We have a labor shortage in Czechia so two or three years in service ending with a good reference will get a youth started off right. It could be five or six years before a university graduate salary overtakes them. If they do. School-leavers think long and hard about whether a University degree is a good investment or whether they should go straight to work. It's probably the first adult decision they make."
Conrad had noticed something else. "The younger ones are all fairly similar in body type. Hair color and eye color are gone of course. Will we be able to pick up the two older ones? If they are there, of course.
"We might" The Senior Pathologist, Dr. Karel Holub, looked very thoughtful. "I won’t promise it but there are a number of things that might have survived the burning. We could probably present the data as percentages. This one has a twenty percent chance of being one of the older pair, this one a forty percent chance. That's likely to be the best we can do. Remember, we are having problems confirming gender. We'll have to go to bone structure for that."
"It would help a lot. If the older pair aren’t there, that would make it likely they did it. If they are, that would cut the suspects down to two out of four." Lenka didn't really sound that convinced which was a good thing because she'd just made a serious mistake. I pointed it out so that Conrad wouldn’t have to.
"Two out of six, Lenka. Remember the two Byrtus children. They were, or maybe are, sixteen and seventeen. That puts them in the younger age group as well. They might be in there. Or they might not."
Lenka went completely white as she remembered the autopsy results in the file on Jana Byrtus and her mind jumped to the obvious conclusion. "Oh, dear God."
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Four
Kladruby Police Station, Striebska Street, Kladruby
The early morning meeting covered a lot of the developments that had taken place overnight. The detailed search of the Byrtus mansion was almost complete and it had revealed that a substantial quantity of cash and valuables were missing, presumably stolen. As a result, the idea this may have been a burglary gone badly wrong had been upgraded but not by much. The evidence was still growing that this had been an inside job. If you've ever done bodyguard work, you'll know it's the nightmare scenario. All too often, the situation goes critical before you're even aware it exists. From the point of view of the Společenství, this was something of a relief since they couldn't be held responsible for the failure of the protection they had provided under those circumstances.
Dr. Karel Holub and his pathology team had been working all night on the bodies we had found. Most of their effort had been concentrated on the three bodies that were in good condition since they really offered the only chance of getting some information. Holub had his notes in front of him. "First the bad news. Pavel Byrtus died last night. Subdural hematoma that the doctors couldn’t control. They'll do a full autopsy in Prague. Now, better news. We have also formally identified the bodies of Jana Byrtus, Ladislav Fischer, and Monika Palová. Madame Byrtus died from exsanguination caused by multiple knife cuts all over her body. Cause of death for Fischer was a single gunshot wound that entered through the back of his head and exited through his forehead. No trace of gunshot residue so he was probably shot from at least five or possibly ten meters away. Cause of death for Palová was manual strangulation after being shot through the left kneecap and then beaten, probably while she tried to defend herself."
"Fighting with a kneecap gone is almost impossible." I'm no unarmed combat expert, according to Achillea I can barely defend myself. That's seriously harsh but I suppose by 'Lea's standards it's largely true. Then again, very few people do meet Achillea's standards. I am a gun-chick and my expertise does extend to rating work from others. In this case, with a kneecap blown out, Palová would have been unable to stand, let alone fight. "Was she shot from in front or behind?"
"The entry point was from the front, just above the patella, the exit wound was very large, but we think it was lower than the entry point. The knee joint was completely destroyed."
"Those two shots are more than civilian standard. Not professional but somebody who knows how to handle guns."
"That's not uncommon here in Czechia. Hunting is a major social activity with target practice closely related to it." Lenka was obviously still shaken by the realization that the Byrtus children might well have been involved in the murder of their mother. "We found guns in the house of course and have taken them in for forensic examination. We don't know if any of the Byrtus guns are missing. We don’t register guns here, we learned that lesson sixty years ago."
The latter had been an explanation aimed at Conrad and myself. When the Nazis had occupied Czechoslovakia back before the Second World War, they had used gun registration records to confiscate privately-owned firearms and thus crippled the formation of any resistance movement. The same thing had happened all across Europe; some countries had learned from the experience and others hadn’t. Obviously, the Czech Republic had. In this case, it was causing problems. That led me to something else I needed to know. "Do we have any idea what was used to shoot Fischer?"
"We think it was a Russian 7.62mm rifle, either a Moisin-Nagant or an SVD. We can’t be certain until we find the bullet. It should be stuck in a wall somewhere. We're hoping it wasn't a hollow-point." A very rich person with an army surplus rifle didn't sound right to me. Normally, people like that have expensive custom-made rifles and pistols. After all, I do. Then, again, we don’t know if it was one of the in-house guns. The criminals could have brought it with them. I was just about to say that when Conrad said exactly what I had been thinking. Not surprising, we've been working together for a long time now.
"We are looking for an impact point in the walls or floor. Now, the four charred bodies in the grounds. We are 80 percent certain that two of the four are the older members of staff, the butler and the cook. That's much more positive than we expected. The other two bodies are completely unidentifiable. We think they are one male and one female from what is left of the pelvic bones but to be honest we aren't really confident of that. The way the bodies have been burned . . ."
"I would say they were burned in the pit and then the pit filled in when the fire died down but was still active. They would have been cooked as well as incinerated." Sasha looked around, noting that Penny had been unable to contain herself and had vomited into a wastepaper basket. "I am so sorry, my lady, but it had to be said. When our soldiers found bodies of those killed by the fascists, often the same thing had happened. Sometimes with dozens of bodies in the grave."
"You think this was fascists?" I couldn’t keep incredulity out of my voice. I knew of course that there were still tiny outposts of fascist groups in Europe, but they were all complete morons. If they had set fire to a pit full of bodies, they'd probably forget to get out before lighting it up.
"It is possible enough for us to put onto Tovarish Conrad's boards and discuss." Something to remember about Russians, they are paranoid about a revival of fascism. Sasha is no different.
"I agree." Conrad sounded unusually brisk, the way he sounded when he wanted to move on. "The two burned bodies inside the house. No identification?"
"Other than that they were a young man and a slightly older girl, no. Once again, the burn damage was very severe. The bones were badly charred and there was much fire damage to the room. Fortunately, it didn’t spread. Why we are not quite sure."
Conrad grimaced. "So we have a young man and a young woman burned to death in the woods, another young man and young woman burned inside the house and a young man and young woman missing. Eddie, any more signs of bodies out there?"
Eddie looked at Lenka and they shook their heads. Conrad looked at me and winked slightly. It was apparent our police captain and geophysics expert had been hitting things off very well. Eddie looked at us, knew we'd guessed and flushed slightly. "No sign. We've found a lot more traces of that building though. We don’t know what we have down there but it's big and old. Once all this is over, it will make a good dig."
"So, we have three sets of two people, all very similar in general characteristics. Two of the sets are dead, one is missing. I think we must look on the probability that the missing set of two are responsible for this massacre. The only other option is that this was an abduction and the two missing people are being held somewhere." Conrad thought about that and I could almost see the wheels in his mind turning. "The thing that doesn’t fit any of this is the sheer brutality of these crimes. That one fact forces us back to the concept that this was a revenge massacre. If the Byrtus children have been kidnapped, the killing of everybody else, including the two people who could pay a ransom, precludes money as a motive."
"There is no forensic evidence that there were other people on the scene. Our teams spent all night going over the property. Most convincingly, we have been unable to find evidence of any other vehicles turning up on the scene. Every set of tire tracks, every piece of trace evidence is accounted for. So far we couldn’t even find a boot print out of place." Daniel shook his head, partly indicating the lack of evidence that might point to other people on the site, partly at the sheer horror of the scene.
"Have we eliminated home invasion as a scenario?" I've seen quite a few home invasions and they all tended to be seriously brutal things. Home invasions are mostly about sadism and control so serious abuse of the victims is always a major feature. I was on scene once when a group tried it on a family that was under our protection. Because we were there, the family escaped unhurt, but the local pigs ate well that night.
"Only in that there is no sign of forced entry and, like we said, no trace yet of intruders. I hate to say this but I think the two kids are the missing ones and all six of the burned bodies are the domestic staff." I looked at Conrad while Daniel was talking, and he was nodding in agreement.
"What sort of children could murder their parents like that?" Penny was almost hysterical at the thought.
You'd all be proud of me because I restrained myself from saying 'me for a start'. Penny, and the other members of the archeology team had come straight from school to university and then stayed to work there. I think Hardly Phil was the only one who had any life experience outside that protected environment. And Raw Eddie of course. Other than those two, they'd no idea of just how brutal the world is outside of that environment. "Daniel, I get the feeling we ought to stage a re-enactment of the attack, don’t you?"
Daniel agreed; we'd do the play-acting inside while the archeology team had a look at the building they'd found. It would keep them out of the way while we did the bad bit.
Byrtus Estate, Kladruby
Daniel was playing Ladislav Fischer and was standing on the upper floor balcony where a large pool of blood marked where he had been hit. The forensic people had determined from lividity and blood splatter that he had been on his face for about twenty minutes after being killed. Lenka was playing Monika Palová. There was quite a debate about her start position. One set of opinions was that she had been with Fischer, but I disagreed with that. I was convinced if she had been, she would have seen what was happening and been able to do something. I believed that she had been out of sight, had heard the shot and come running to see what had happened. There were two corridors heading back from the balcony to the bedrooms and bathrooms. I thought she would have been in one of them. Since she had been shot from the front, implying she had been facing the killers, that meant she was in the right-hand of those two corridors. That was where the master bedrooms were situated. Conrad thought it over and agreed with me.
We had a policeman and a policewoman playing the butler and cook. The former we put in the 'butler's pantry', a sort of anteroom downstairs close to the front door, the latter in the kitchen at the back of the mansion. Finally, we had four police cadets playing the two maids and two footmen with their time being counted as “field experience”. We assumed they had been cleaning rooms and doing other servantly things. That left only the two killers. Sasha and me of course. Now, you have probably seen TV shows where the cops do a re-enactment of a crime. The cops set it up, walk through what they think happened like zombies and then make a case-breaking conclusion. It doesn’t happen like that. Sasha and I must have “attacked” the household more than a dozen times over the next few hours, each time either coming in by different routes or with the staff in different places. We came in together or separately, worked as a pair or individually. What each run did was eliminate a certain set of possibilities and zero in on the ones that fitted the situation at the end. It’s a slow, demanding process and there is a reason why the police are reluctant to use it. It was made more so because the forensic people were still at work and we had to keep the reconstructions to the areas they had cleared. To be fair that was most of them.
Almost the first thing that we eliminated was the possibility that the attackers had all come through the front door. No matter which way we tried it, either we were killed on the spot by Ladislav Fischer or he and Monika Palová held us off long enough for the staff to escape out the back. I must admit I was beginning to doubt whether two people could have done all this. On a couple of runs, we got the butler and sometimes Fischer and/or Palová, but it still meant the majority of the staff escaped. Coming in the back door was equally problematic; the only back door led directly into the kitchen. On one memorable run, the cook got us, primarily because we didn’t expect her to be ready to put up a fight. She threw “boiling water” in my face and then hit poor Sasha over the head with the saucepan. That was an unambiguous victory for the defense that got the policewoman playing the cook a standing ovation while Sasha and I had to buy the beer for lunch.
Most significantly, we had pretty much eliminated the possibility that the building had been attacked from outside unless there were a lot more people involved than we believed. Looking back, I suspect several people had thought that but kept quiet. Also, we had shown that the evacuation scenario prepared by the Společenství was sound and well-planned. Come noon, we ate outside (to avoid contaminating the crime scene, or something) with the archeologists who were getting quite excited over the archeology we had stumbled across. A preliminary dig had shown the first wall we had found was well-built out of large dressed stones. Dating was going to be an issue, but it could be as old as late Roman or early Frankish. Phil’s opinion was that it was indeed Roman and suggested that the province of Noricum had extended further north than originally thought. Prema disagreed and suggested that it had been built by a local chief who thought adopting Roman ways would keep the real Romans away. It might sound weird, but it was a really fun lunch and made a good break from the re-enactments.
We restarted work with one precept firmly in place. The attack that had wiped out the household had originated from inside the house. Amy other option would need more people. Also, we were convinced that Ladislav Fischer had been the first to die. He was probably the most skilled of the defenders and getting him out of play must have been the top priority. In fact, the chance of doing so may have been the determining factor in when the attack started.
One important piece fell into place when the forensic people finally found the bullet that had killed him. It was a 7.62mm all right but it had been fired from a Nagant revolver. The significance of that? It's a pretty bad revolver as those things go but the Nagant is the only revolver that can use a suppressor. Say again, a very rich man will not buy a poorly-regarded military surplus revolver unless he is a collector and there was no sign that Pavel Byrtus was that. So, the revolver had been bought by somebody else. Either because it was very cheap or because it could take a suppressor. The former suggested a member of the staff, the latter one of the Byrtus children.
The bullet had been full metal jacket and had been lodged high up the wall. That’s why it had taken time to find. It also told us that the shooter was smaller than Fischer, no surprise there, he was a big man. Most importantly it told us that the shot had come from the left-hand corridor area and that’s where the two children had their rooms. It was looking worse for them all the time. If the children did it, then the purchase of a suppressed Nagant meant they had been planning this for some time.
Our first reconstruction after lunch had nearly everything falling into place. Sasha and I started from the left had corridor and 'shot Ladislav Fischer using a suppressed pistol ' Poor guy would literally never have known what had hit him. The important thing is that despite what civilians think, suppressors don’t silence weapons. They reduce the noise level certainly but not as much as people think. What they do is change the character of the shot, so people don’t recognize it as being one. The famous 'car backfire' effect. The mansion staff didn’t recognize the shot for what it was but Monika Palová had. She'd run out from wherever she had been to see what was happening and been knee-capped by one of the two attackers. She'd tried to defend herself, failed and been strangled. Then, that attacker had restrained Jana Byrtus. While that was happening, the other attacker had gone downstairs, collected the cook and assembled the four surviving staff at the foot of the main staircase. Once the pair of attackers were in full control of the mansion, Jana Byrtus had been brought downstairs and her crucifixion set up before the four staff had been taken outside and killed.
At some point, Pavel Byrtus had arrived unexpectedly and, when he saw his wife in dire distress, run to her aid and been slugged across the back of his head for his pains. Then, he had been thrown in the cellar. After Jana Byrtus had finally died, the attackers had looted the house to make it look like a robbery. Then they had gone back to the room where the two surviving members of staff had been imprisoned and burned them, probably assuming the fire would spread to the rest of the house. For some reason, it hadn't. Conrad says that was probably divine providence to make sure the crime was detected. I have my doubts on that.
We tried other scenarios but that was the only one that really fitted all the facts that we had. Conrad summed everything up after tabulating all the data. It had to be the two children who had conducted the massacre. The dynamics just didn't fit any other way.
"Jana Byrtus was the primary target." Conrad was being very neutral which is a good signed that he was deeply disturbed by what he had learned. "Fischer and Palová were killed because they were in the way, the staff because they were witnesses and Pavel Byrtus because he had come home unexpectedly early. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If this had gone as planned, he would have come home to find the house burned to a ruin with the bodies unidentifiable. The missing valuables would have suggested members of staff had robbed the place."
"The bodies in the pit would have told us something had gone wrong." Daniel objected.
"If we had found them. Remember, you told us that the Czechia Policie don’t have ground penetrating radar yet. Without that and the team we brought in, its odds-on the bodies wouldn't have been found." Conrad shook his head slightly. "The question I have is why? Why did those children want to kill their mother so much?"
Alright, I must admit I bristled a bit there. That sounded almost too close to the line 'what did she do to provoke them'. I'd heard that once and killed the speaker. That had been a very long time ago and I was a different person back then. It still pushed buttons that it's better not to push. I think Conrad realized he was close to a dangerous line because he added, a bit hastily, I thought, "The obvious reason being she either did something they didn't like, or she stopped them from doing something they wanted to. We said all along that this looked more like a revenge killing than anything else. "
There was an eight hundred pound gorilla in the room that everybody was carefully avoiding. I couldn’t understand why and was about to bring it up but Conrad shook his head slightly and I held my tongue. I made a note to ask why later.
Anyway, the day's work ended with two suspects identified even to Conrad's satisfaction and the Czech Police issuing a bolo for Ludvik and Zofia Byrtus. We had a really good fix on who and an equally solid grasp on how. The question that was befuddling people was why? The standard reasons, sex, money, revenge and cover-up all still applied of course, and revenge was head-and-shoulders above the rest. But, revenge for what? What had Jana Byrtus done that had made her children butcher her the way they had? I really didn’t like that thought.
Kladruby Police Station, Striebska Street, Kladruby
The early morning meeting covered a lot of the developments that had taken place overnight. The detailed search of the Byrtus mansion was almost complete and it had revealed that a substantial quantity of cash and valuables were missing, presumably stolen. As a result, the idea this may have been a burglary gone badly wrong had been upgraded but not by much. The evidence was still growing that this had been an inside job. If you've ever done bodyguard work, you'll know it's the nightmare scenario. All too often, the situation goes critical before you're even aware it exists. From the point of view of the Společenství, this was something of a relief since they couldn't be held responsible for the failure of the protection they had provided under those circumstances.
Dr. Karel Holub and his pathology team had been working all night on the bodies we had found. Most of their effort had been concentrated on the three bodies that were in good condition since they really offered the only chance of getting some information. Holub had his notes in front of him. "First the bad news. Pavel Byrtus died last night. Subdural hematoma that the doctors couldn’t control. They'll do a full autopsy in Prague. Now, better news. We have also formally identified the bodies of Jana Byrtus, Ladislav Fischer, and Monika Palová. Madame Byrtus died from exsanguination caused by multiple knife cuts all over her body. Cause of death for Fischer was a single gunshot wound that entered through the back of his head and exited through his forehead. No trace of gunshot residue so he was probably shot from at least five or possibly ten meters away. Cause of death for Palová was manual strangulation after being shot through the left kneecap and then beaten, probably while she tried to defend herself."
"Fighting with a kneecap gone is almost impossible." I'm no unarmed combat expert, according to Achillea I can barely defend myself. That's seriously harsh but I suppose by 'Lea's standards it's largely true. Then again, very few people do meet Achillea's standards. I am a gun-chick and my expertise does extend to rating work from others. In this case, with a kneecap blown out, Palová would have been unable to stand, let alone fight. "Was she shot from in front or behind?"
"The entry point was from the front, just above the patella, the exit wound was very large, but we think it was lower than the entry point. The knee joint was completely destroyed."
"Those two shots are more than civilian standard. Not professional but somebody who knows how to handle guns."
"That's not uncommon here in Czechia. Hunting is a major social activity with target practice closely related to it." Lenka was obviously still shaken by the realization that the Byrtus children might well have been involved in the murder of their mother. "We found guns in the house of course and have taken them in for forensic examination. We don't know if any of the Byrtus guns are missing. We don’t register guns here, we learned that lesson sixty years ago."
The latter had been an explanation aimed at Conrad and myself. When the Nazis had occupied Czechoslovakia back before the Second World War, they had used gun registration records to confiscate privately-owned firearms and thus crippled the formation of any resistance movement. The same thing had happened all across Europe; some countries had learned from the experience and others hadn’t. Obviously, the Czech Republic had. In this case, it was causing problems. That led me to something else I needed to know. "Do we have any idea what was used to shoot Fischer?"
"We think it was a Russian 7.62mm rifle, either a Moisin-Nagant or an SVD. We can’t be certain until we find the bullet. It should be stuck in a wall somewhere. We're hoping it wasn't a hollow-point." A very rich person with an army surplus rifle didn't sound right to me. Normally, people like that have expensive custom-made rifles and pistols. After all, I do. Then, again, we don’t know if it was one of the in-house guns. The criminals could have brought it with them. I was just about to say that when Conrad said exactly what I had been thinking. Not surprising, we've been working together for a long time now.
"We are looking for an impact point in the walls or floor. Now, the four charred bodies in the grounds. We are 80 percent certain that two of the four are the older members of staff, the butler and the cook. That's much more positive than we expected. The other two bodies are completely unidentifiable. We think they are one male and one female from what is left of the pelvic bones but to be honest we aren't really confident of that. The way the bodies have been burned . . ."
"I would say they were burned in the pit and then the pit filled in when the fire died down but was still active. They would have been cooked as well as incinerated." Sasha looked around, noting that Penny had been unable to contain herself and had vomited into a wastepaper basket. "I am so sorry, my lady, but it had to be said. When our soldiers found bodies of those killed by the fascists, often the same thing had happened. Sometimes with dozens of bodies in the grave."
"You think this was fascists?" I couldn’t keep incredulity out of my voice. I knew of course that there were still tiny outposts of fascist groups in Europe, but they were all complete morons. If they had set fire to a pit full of bodies, they'd probably forget to get out before lighting it up.
"It is possible enough for us to put onto Tovarish Conrad's boards and discuss." Something to remember about Russians, they are paranoid about a revival of fascism. Sasha is no different.
"I agree." Conrad sounded unusually brisk, the way he sounded when he wanted to move on. "The two burned bodies inside the house. No identification?"
"Other than that they were a young man and a slightly older girl, no. Once again, the burn damage was very severe. The bones were badly charred and there was much fire damage to the room. Fortunately, it didn’t spread. Why we are not quite sure."
Conrad grimaced. "So we have a young man and a young woman burned to death in the woods, another young man and young woman burned inside the house and a young man and young woman missing. Eddie, any more signs of bodies out there?"
Eddie looked at Lenka and they shook their heads. Conrad looked at me and winked slightly. It was apparent our police captain and geophysics expert had been hitting things off very well. Eddie looked at us, knew we'd guessed and flushed slightly. "No sign. We've found a lot more traces of that building though. We don’t know what we have down there but it's big and old. Once all this is over, it will make a good dig."
"So, we have three sets of two people, all very similar in general characteristics. Two of the sets are dead, one is missing. I think we must look on the probability that the missing set of two are responsible for this massacre. The only other option is that this was an abduction and the two missing people are being held somewhere." Conrad thought about that and I could almost see the wheels in his mind turning. "The thing that doesn’t fit any of this is the sheer brutality of these crimes. That one fact forces us back to the concept that this was a revenge massacre. If the Byrtus children have been kidnapped, the killing of everybody else, including the two people who could pay a ransom, precludes money as a motive."
"There is no forensic evidence that there were other people on the scene. Our teams spent all night going over the property. Most convincingly, we have been unable to find evidence of any other vehicles turning up on the scene. Every set of tire tracks, every piece of trace evidence is accounted for. So far we couldn’t even find a boot print out of place." Daniel shook his head, partly indicating the lack of evidence that might point to other people on the site, partly at the sheer horror of the scene.
"Have we eliminated home invasion as a scenario?" I've seen quite a few home invasions and they all tended to be seriously brutal things. Home invasions are mostly about sadism and control so serious abuse of the victims is always a major feature. I was on scene once when a group tried it on a family that was under our protection. Because we were there, the family escaped unhurt, but the local pigs ate well that night.
"Only in that there is no sign of forced entry and, like we said, no trace yet of intruders. I hate to say this but I think the two kids are the missing ones and all six of the burned bodies are the domestic staff." I looked at Conrad while Daniel was talking, and he was nodding in agreement.
"What sort of children could murder their parents like that?" Penny was almost hysterical at the thought.
You'd all be proud of me because I restrained myself from saying 'me for a start'. Penny, and the other members of the archeology team had come straight from school to university and then stayed to work there. I think Hardly Phil was the only one who had any life experience outside that protected environment. And Raw Eddie of course. Other than those two, they'd no idea of just how brutal the world is outside of that environment. "Daniel, I get the feeling we ought to stage a re-enactment of the attack, don’t you?"
Daniel agreed; we'd do the play-acting inside while the archeology team had a look at the building they'd found. It would keep them out of the way while we did the bad bit.
Byrtus Estate, Kladruby
Daniel was playing Ladislav Fischer and was standing on the upper floor balcony where a large pool of blood marked where he had been hit. The forensic people had determined from lividity and blood splatter that he had been on his face for about twenty minutes after being killed. Lenka was playing Monika Palová. There was quite a debate about her start position. One set of opinions was that she had been with Fischer, but I disagreed with that. I was convinced if she had been, she would have seen what was happening and been able to do something. I believed that she had been out of sight, had heard the shot and come running to see what had happened. There were two corridors heading back from the balcony to the bedrooms and bathrooms. I thought she would have been in one of them. Since she had been shot from the front, implying she had been facing the killers, that meant she was in the right-hand of those two corridors. That was where the master bedrooms were situated. Conrad thought it over and agreed with me.
We had a policeman and a policewoman playing the butler and cook. The former we put in the 'butler's pantry', a sort of anteroom downstairs close to the front door, the latter in the kitchen at the back of the mansion. Finally, we had four police cadets playing the two maids and two footmen with their time being counted as “field experience”. We assumed they had been cleaning rooms and doing other servantly things. That left only the two killers. Sasha and me of course. Now, you have probably seen TV shows where the cops do a re-enactment of a crime. The cops set it up, walk through what they think happened like zombies and then make a case-breaking conclusion. It doesn’t happen like that. Sasha and I must have “attacked” the household more than a dozen times over the next few hours, each time either coming in by different routes or with the staff in different places. We came in together or separately, worked as a pair or individually. What each run did was eliminate a certain set of possibilities and zero in on the ones that fitted the situation at the end. It’s a slow, demanding process and there is a reason why the police are reluctant to use it. It was made more so because the forensic people were still at work and we had to keep the reconstructions to the areas they had cleared. To be fair that was most of them.
Almost the first thing that we eliminated was the possibility that the attackers had all come through the front door. No matter which way we tried it, either we were killed on the spot by Ladislav Fischer or he and Monika Palová held us off long enough for the staff to escape out the back. I must admit I was beginning to doubt whether two people could have done all this. On a couple of runs, we got the butler and sometimes Fischer and/or Palová, but it still meant the majority of the staff escaped. Coming in the back door was equally problematic; the only back door led directly into the kitchen. On one memorable run, the cook got us, primarily because we didn’t expect her to be ready to put up a fight. She threw “boiling water” in my face and then hit poor Sasha over the head with the saucepan. That was an unambiguous victory for the defense that got the policewoman playing the cook a standing ovation while Sasha and I had to buy the beer for lunch.
Most significantly, we had pretty much eliminated the possibility that the building had been attacked from outside unless there were a lot more people involved than we believed. Looking back, I suspect several people had thought that but kept quiet. Also, we had shown that the evacuation scenario prepared by the Společenství was sound and well-planned. Come noon, we ate outside (to avoid contaminating the crime scene, or something) with the archeologists who were getting quite excited over the archeology we had stumbled across. A preliminary dig had shown the first wall we had found was well-built out of large dressed stones. Dating was going to be an issue, but it could be as old as late Roman or early Frankish. Phil’s opinion was that it was indeed Roman and suggested that the province of Noricum had extended further north than originally thought. Prema disagreed and suggested that it had been built by a local chief who thought adopting Roman ways would keep the real Romans away. It might sound weird, but it was a really fun lunch and made a good break from the re-enactments.
We restarted work with one precept firmly in place. The attack that had wiped out the household had originated from inside the house. Amy other option would need more people. Also, we were convinced that Ladislav Fischer had been the first to die. He was probably the most skilled of the defenders and getting him out of play must have been the top priority. In fact, the chance of doing so may have been the determining factor in when the attack started.
One important piece fell into place when the forensic people finally found the bullet that had killed him. It was a 7.62mm all right but it had been fired from a Nagant revolver. The significance of that? It's a pretty bad revolver as those things go but the Nagant is the only revolver that can use a suppressor. Say again, a very rich man will not buy a poorly-regarded military surplus revolver unless he is a collector and there was no sign that Pavel Byrtus was that. So, the revolver had been bought by somebody else. Either because it was very cheap or because it could take a suppressor. The former suggested a member of the staff, the latter one of the Byrtus children.
The bullet had been full metal jacket and had been lodged high up the wall. That’s why it had taken time to find. It also told us that the shooter was smaller than Fischer, no surprise there, he was a big man. Most importantly it told us that the shot had come from the left-hand corridor area and that’s where the two children had their rooms. It was looking worse for them all the time. If the children did it, then the purchase of a suppressed Nagant meant they had been planning this for some time.
Our first reconstruction after lunch had nearly everything falling into place. Sasha and I started from the left had corridor and 'shot Ladislav Fischer using a suppressed pistol ' Poor guy would literally never have known what had hit him. The important thing is that despite what civilians think, suppressors don’t silence weapons. They reduce the noise level certainly but not as much as people think. What they do is change the character of the shot, so people don’t recognize it as being one. The famous 'car backfire' effect. The mansion staff didn’t recognize the shot for what it was but Monika Palová had. She'd run out from wherever she had been to see what was happening and been knee-capped by one of the two attackers. She'd tried to defend herself, failed and been strangled. Then, that attacker had restrained Jana Byrtus. While that was happening, the other attacker had gone downstairs, collected the cook and assembled the four surviving staff at the foot of the main staircase. Once the pair of attackers were in full control of the mansion, Jana Byrtus had been brought downstairs and her crucifixion set up before the four staff had been taken outside and killed.
At some point, Pavel Byrtus had arrived unexpectedly and, when he saw his wife in dire distress, run to her aid and been slugged across the back of his head for his pains. Then, he had been thrown in the cellar. After Jana Byrtus had finally died, the attackers had looted the house to make it look like a robbery. Then they had gone back to the room where the two surviving members of staff had been imprisoned and burned them, probably assuming the fire would spread to the rest of the house. For some reason, it hadn't. Conrad says that was probably divine providence to make sure the crime was detected. I have my doubts on that.
We tried other scenarios but that was the only one that really fitted all the facts that we had. Conrad summed everything up after tabulating all the data. It had to be the two children who had conducted the massacre. The dynamics just didn't fit any other way.
"Jana Byrtus was the primary target." Conrad was being very neutral which is a good signed that he was deeply disturbed by what he had learned. "Fischer and Palová were killed because they were in the way, the staff because they were witnesses and Pavel Byrtus because he had come home unexpectedly early. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If this had gone as planned, he would have come home to find the house burned to a ruin with the bodies unidentifiable. The missing valuables would have suggested members of staff had robbed the place."
"The bodies in the pit would have told us something had gone wrong." Daniel objected.
"If we had found them. Remember, you told us that the Czechia Policie don’t have ground penetrating radar yet. Without that and the team we brought in, its odds-on the bodies wouldn't have been found." Conrad shook his head slightly. "The question I have is why? Why did those children want to kill their mother so much?"
Alright, I must admit I bristled a bit there. That sounded almost too close to the line 'what did she do to provoke them'. I'd heard that once and killed the speaker. That had been a very long time ago and I was a different person back then. It still pushed buttons that it's better not to push. I think Conrad realized he was close to a dangerous line because he added, a bit hastily, I thought, "The obvious reason being she either did something they didn't like, or she stopped them from doing something they wanted to. We said all along that this looked more like a revenge killing than anything else. "
There was an eight hundred pound gorilla in the room that everybody was carefully avoiding. I couldn’t understand why and was about to bring it up but Conrad shook his head slightly and I held my tongue. I made a note to ask why later.
Anyway, the day's work ended with two suspects identified even to Conrad's satisfaction and the Czech Police issuing a bolo for Ludvik and Zofia Byrtus. We had a really good fix on who and an equally solid grasp on how. The question that was befuddling people was why? The standard reasons, sex, money, revenge and cover-up all still applied of course, and revenge was head-and-shoulders above the rest. But, revenge for what? What had Jana Byrtus done that had made her children butcher her the way they had? I really didn’t like that thought.
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Five
River View Suite, Smetana Hotel, Karoliny Svetle 208, Prague
"At least the personnel situation has eased off a bit." Conrad sounded quite relieved at the smaller number of people who were around. Penny and the Lincoln University team had departed for their dig in Slovakia, Sasha and his people had gone back to Moskva, secure in the knowledge that a crisis had had been averted while Jarek and his friends were contacting all their protected clients, explaining what had happened and the steps that were being taken to ensure that it didn’t happen again. I knew, and Conrad suspected, that those assurances were disingenuous at best. This kind of situation was so far outside the normal run of things that it was unstoppable.
That's not quite true; it is possible to defend against situations that are way outside the box but doing so puts the clients under great strain and massive intrusion into their personal space. Like everything else, it’s a balance between personal security and living something close to a normal life. It’s a balance I've lived with all my life and my solution to it is to assume I am already dead.
Really, we ought to be leaving as well. Our part in this situation is done; the guilty parties are identified and the evidence against them is overwhelming. Even if it wasn't, there is no danger that the wrong people will be arrested. The task at hand is finding Ludvik and Zofia Byrtus and that's something the police are very well-equipped to do. My guess they'll be arrested inside a week. Less if they take it into their heads to buy a Chinese take-out. Yes, we have passed the word around.
Daniel and his people are very happy. They used this case so they could scare up enough money from the Police Budget to order three radar-equipped ATVs from us. To seal the deal, we gave them an even bigger discount than usual if they agreed to loan them to archeology groups if they weren't required for investigations. Kind-hearted people aren't we? Shows you how big our profit margin is. Also, we may get some additional purchases from the universities out of it. We did, by the way. See, virtue is its own reward. You'll have to imagine me rolling my eyes at that point.
"Time for us to head home too?" Conrad looked up at me and nodded cheerfully. We like going home and we both have nice fat payments to stash away. It's odd, there is a set tariff of charges for me doing my things, but I've never heard Conrad ask for payment for the work he does. Yet people give him money anyway. Lots of it and Lillith manages it for him. She manages my stash of cash as well and I'm better-off now than I've ever been.
We were about to start packing when the telephone rang. "Angel? It's Daniel here. Thank God I caught you. We need your help again."
"Conrad's right here. Con . . . "
"No, Angel, you don’t understand. We need your help. Conrad's too of course, but this time around, we need yours most of all."
I didn't like the sound of that. "What's the problem?"
"We've been chasing the Byrtus children and we've discovered they have links to a radical cult. That cult has what they call a refuge out near Brno and we think it is a good possibility they are inside. IF we confirm that, we may have to go in and get them and we don’t have a SWAT team."
"Good for you. We'll be there."
Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
The nice thing about Czechia is that it avoided nearly all the damage from the War and has character. Svobody Square is a good example; its mostly 19th century style and earlier with a couple of new buildings filling in gaps. The police station is one such gap-filler, obviously built in the 1970s. I don’t know what happened there. Anyway, our air taxi brought us down from Prague and the staff in the station were waiting for us. The desk crew had obviously been told I was coming because they didn’t even shudder when they saw my boys.
"Angel, Conrad, thank you for getting down here so fast." Daniel had obviously heard us arrive but Lenka wasn't with him. I'd got the impression the two worked closely together. "We did a background check on the suspects and found some rather disturbing information. They were going to the local gymnasium, that's what we call high schools. Until about a year ago, they were just normal kids but they started to become abnormal. They froze everybody else out, kept themselves to themselves and their whole behavior pattern changed. Their school-fellows reacted by freezing them out as well and started to spread rumors they were having a sexual relationship. The situation started to go down from there. Their dress sense changed. . . "
"Let me guess, lot of black, long coats, girl wore heavy, over-dramatic makeup?" Conrad sounded warily familiar with the case.
Daniel looked at the reports in a file and nodded. "Exactly. How did you know?"
"Standard behavior change for somebody about to do a spree-killing. I suspect the other students were right; the two had initiated a sexual relationship that cut them off from everybody else. You got this from the school principal?"
"We call school principals the Feditel but yes. And their main teacher, their Ucitel. Both described their attitudes and behavior as extremely unhealthy."
"They're lucky. If they were building up to a killing spree at the school, it's probable the family massacre got in first by a whisker." Conrad knows people and usually I take his assessments as gospel.
"It's the clothes that gave them away, Every one of these spree-killings involves long black coats. If we institute long black coat control, these spree-killings would end." I was agreeing with Conrad for the simple reason I know massacres. From our different backgrounds, Conrad and I were in complete synch on this. Outlaw long black coats. It's for the children.
"It's not just teenage boys who have a strong sex-drive. Their sisters do too, and the sister can often be more available and a lot more receptive. In fact, there's a very good chance the sister is the dominant one in the relationship. She's a year or so older remember. At that age, a year or so makes a big difference." Conrad paused for a second and gave me a sideways glance. "Usually."
Daniel looked confused, so I took mercy on him. "I made my first kill when I was twelve. By fourteen, I was as hard as they come. When I worked with an adult, I was in charge and gave the orders."
"I'd never have guessed." Daniel said that a bit drily and I reminded myself not to underestimate him. He was the most dangerous kind of policeman, the one who seems harmless and inoffensive right up to the moment he slaps the cuffs on you. "Anyway, we went back to the Byrtus mansion and made another search of the suspect's rooms. Both rooms were badly burned but we found a few things of interest. Then we found Zofia Byrtus's computer, thrown under the bed in Ludvik Byrtus's room. The file cabinets had been wiped of course but we were able to restore most of the files. There was a lot of propaganda material on it from the Radiační Obranná Liga.
"What is that when it is at home?" Conrad was curious. It wasn't often he ran across an organization he had never heard of.
"The Radiation Defense League." Daniel hesitated, remembering he was speaking to people who were, theoretically at least, Americans. "After the Big One, the north-east of the country was swept by fallout. The government and the Americans came in and cleared it all up. Nobody knew about hot-spots back then so they missed some and other areas weren't cleared as well as they might have been. The government prides itself that they did as well as anybody could under the circumstances, but some people died from the radiation and others got sick. The ROL though claimed that the people living in the north east were left to die as an experiment while the rich people went to live in the south west. They also claim there was a gigantic conspiracy theory to cover it all up. They had a lot of support once but as people from the immediate post-war era died off, they shrank into irrelevance. These days, almost nobody really takes them seriously. All that is left is a hard core though that has shut themselves off from the rest of society and claim they are protecting themselves from the evil government who still want to experiment on anybody else. Their primary shelter is a bit west of here. It's fairly obvious from the files we found that Ludvig and Zofia are, or have become, strong supporters of the group and we think it's likely that they have taken cover in the shelter there."
"Did you find anything else interesting?"
Daniel shifted his feet a bit uncomfortably. "Quite a bit of femdom pornography. Which fits what you two were saying about the girl being the dominant member of the pair."
"How many of these 'shelters' do the Radiační Obranná Liga have?" Conrad was obviously worried about people storming into the shelter and finding neither of the Byrtus children were there. A lot of innocent people could get hurt that way.
"The one main one and half a dozen others scattered around the south-west."
"That's the ones you know about." I wasn't going to let that one pass. Daniel was making some very dangerous assumptions. I recognized them because the 14K uses the same technique to mask our activities. We have our "houses" which are semi-public. Know who to ask and you can find out where your local one is easily enough. One or two even have signs outside but that depends on the legal standing of the Triads there. But we also have places that are very closely-guarded secrets. I was prepared to bet a lot of money the ROL did the same.
"I know." Daniel glanced around. "Lenka has gone undercover and is doing a recon of the main shelter. If she spots the Byrtus children, she'll let us know."
I winced. All right people, here's a commandment for you. Never, ever admit you have somebody undercover somewhere. You do, you've just painted a target on their back. Look at it this way, if you have somebody in their place, they could just as easily have somebody in yours. "Daniel, do you have an extraction plan?"
Daniel shook his head. I was afraid of that. "Angel, we were hoping you could help us here. I said we don’t have a SWAT team or anything like it. Can you help?"
"You want me to bring in a street combat team? I can do that, for a price, but why? You already have a perfectly good option, ask the Czech Army. They have a well-regarded special forces unit and they'll want to avenge one of their own. And they can present evidence in court afterwards. You can’t put a member of a Jiētóu Zhàndòu on the stand and expect to get a conviction based on their evidence."
"This is Army work, Daniel, leave it to the Army." Conrad made it sound like he was giving independent advice but actually he was quoting me.
"And don’t waste any time. The clock is ticking on Lenka." A gang of villains like us, well, we play by a set of rules. One of them is we don’t kill cops unless we absolutely have to. Creates too much trouble. San Francisco House had a problem once; they had an FBI agent try and infiltrate them. They clocked him very quickly of course but carefully isolated him and fed him all sorts of fake information. Then, when he had outrun his usefulness, some of the guys took him to a bar for his birthday party and gave him a cake decorated with an FBI shield made of icing on it. I'm told he whimpered. Then, once the party was over, he was returned, alive but completely hammered, to the local field office, complete with his cake. Cults and groups of fanatics like the ROL aren't like that. If they clocked Lenka, they'd kill her by inches. Stupid, I know, but the gods don’t hand out smarts where fanatics are concerned. I guess if they did, they wouldn’t be fanatics.
Daniel nodded and went over to the telephone. Ten minutes later he came back. "All right, Angel, we have a section of our Special Forces coming over. They'll be here in an hour and stay at readiness until Lenka gets the information we need and/or we have to go in and get her.
Outside the Radiační Obranná Liga 'Shelter', Trebic, Czech Republic.
It was now well after dark and the whole situation had gone bad from the start. Lenka had called in and confirmed that the Byrtus children were in the shelter, being treated as heroes. Daniel had ordered her to exfiltrate and meet us at a rendezvous point outside the shelter. Only, she hadn’t been there. That meant we would have to go into the complex with her still inside. Assuming she was still alive of course.
The Czech Army people had turned up, six of them and they carried themselves like professionals. They also had pictures of the complex and thermal images that showed where people were. That imagery seemed to show around two dozen people scattered around the complex. That was another thing. Those people inside were scattered all over the place; taking all of them down at once was going to be hard. Not impossible but hard and we would need a lot of luck.
"Four buildings, Angel. No idea where the objectives are." Sergeant Oskar Suchánek was looking at the pictures as well. "We can come in easily enough, using the trees here as cover, but from there . . ."
I could see what he meant. At least twenty-four people, two of whom were the Byrtus children and one of whom was Lenka. No idea which. Now if they were us, or any organized crime gang come to that, I could have worked it out. We'd have Lenka somewhere safe because she was a very valuable bargaining chip. She was worth a whole lot more alive than dead. It's called thinking ahead. If it was Oskar and his people, they'd have her in the middle with the others spread out in a defensive formation, a proper one. You know, alternate positions, fire plans and all that. The problem was the people in front of us were neither. They were fanatics without any idea of what they were doing, and they hadn’t even considered how this was going to go down.
"How about this. We go into the barn first and take down the two people in there." Suchánek paused for a moment. "Do you think they are the Byrtus couple?"
"Lenka said they were being treated as heroes, I think they'll still be with the main group. Good chance Lenka is in there as well. Entertainment for the evening." Conrad flashed me a warning glance; people who don't know me fail to understand that I can’t feel sympathy for others.
"Colonel Kala should never have sent her in there without proper back-up and cover." Suchánek wasn't angry, just frustrated with civilians who didn’t understand how difficult getting into a place like this was. Or how dangerous staying in there was. Then he realized he might have offended me. He didn’t know, of course, that doing so was nearly impossible. "Sorry, is he a friend of yours?"
"No, Oskar, I don’t have friends. But I agree with you. He's exceeded his skill level here and she's going to pay for it unless we pull this off. The barn first, I think. Nail the two people inside there and we're left with the big group."
"Are you coming in with us?"
I shook my head, watching Oskar trying to hide his relief. "I'll stay back. You've got a trained and experienced team and adding a stranger, not just a stranger but a civilian, will disrupt it. I'll be close behind but out of your way. You need me, just whistle."
"You know how to whistle don't you? You put your lips together and blow." Conrad came out with the movie quote deadpan, but it was apparent that he also had bad feelings about this and was trying to distract himself. There was a ripple of laughter around the briefing session, more from tension than anything else.
On the way in to the ‘shelter’ I got a first-class demonstration of field skills by people who knew what they were doing. I’m not sure if the Czech special forces were trained by the American SEALS but they certainly gave that impression. There’s a sort of hierarchy in this kind of thing. Military special forces are top followed by the professional regular armies. Then come our street combat teams and their equivalents, then, a long way behind, Police SWAT teams followed by armed police response squads, the difference between them is that the armed response teams we have trained know their job is to defuse situations without gunplay if possible. At the bottom come mobs of armed civilians, untrained street thugs and joke armies.
I’ve said before that the trouble with SWAT teams is that they try and combine the jobs of police and soldiers and aren’t any good at either. They’re pretty bad at law enforcement and proper soldiers will wipe the floor with them. Or with us come to that. Professional military forces are even worse at law enforcement, but they are very good at taking down organized armed opposition. I was watching that happen right then.
A pair of the guys slipped into the barn. What happened next was apparently nothing. The two occupants had been taken down in complete silence. One of the troops waved me in and, rather proudly I thought, showed me the two people who'd been in there on the floor, out cold. One of them was snoring loudly and I couldn’t help feeling that his wife must really love him. I secured them both with zip-ties and then stayed behind to watch over them. The movies might say otherwise but zip-ties are quick, not secure, and sufficiently determined people can get out of them easily enough. Hint. Bootlaces. Personally, I would have slit their throats, but there were too many witnesses. Shows you that I can make mistakes as well and that was very nearly a big one.
I was just beginning to get comfortable in the barn when there were two bursts of automatic fire from the house followed by a rapid tattoo of semi-automatic shots. Fairly obvious who were the professionals and who were the amateurs there. After everything had gone quiet again, Oskar came back and waved me in. I could see from the expression that he was not well-pleased by what he had found in there. I got the explanation why through my ear-piece before anything else was forthcoming.
"Angel, are they in there?" It was Conrad's voice and he was in extreme distress. So much so I wanted to run back to him. Don’t understand why.
"In and holding. Don’t know what happened yet, but it didn't sound like a real problem. What's going on?"
"Angel, we've screwed up. Everybody has screwed up. This is nothing like the way we thought it was. There is going to be hell to pay."
River View Suite, Smetana Hotel, Karoliny Svetle 208, Prague
"At least the personnel situation has eased off a bit." Conrad sounded quite relieved at the smaller number of people who were around. Penny and the Lincoln University team had departed for their dig in Slovakia, Sasha and his people had gone back to Moskva, secure in the knowledge that a crisis had had been averted while Jarek and his friends were contacting all their protected clients, explaining what had happened and the steps that were being taken to ensure that it didn’t happen again. I knew, and Conrad suspected, that those assurances were disingenuous at best. This kind of situation was so far outside the normal run of things that it was unstoppable.
That's not quite true; it is possible to defend against situations that are way outside the box but doing so puts the clients under great strain and massive intrusion into their personal space. Like everything else, it’s a balance between personal security and living something close to a normal life. It’s a balance I've lived with all my life and my solution to it is to assume I am already dead.
Really, we ought to be leaving as well. Our part in this situation is done; the guilty parties are identified and the evidence against them is overwhelming. Even if it wasn't, there is no danger that the wrong people will be arrested. The task at hand is finding Ludvik and Zofia Byrtus and that's something the police are very well-equipped to do. My guess they'll be arrested inside a week. Less if they take it into their heads to buy a Chinese take-out. Yes, we have passed the word around.
Daniel and his people are very happy. They used this case so they could scare up enough money from the Police Budget to order three radar-equipped ATVs from us. To seal the deal, we gave them an even bigger discount than usual if they agreed to loan them to archeology groups if they weren't required for investigations. Kind-hearted people aren't we? Shows you how big our profit margin is. Also, we may get some additional purchases from the universities out of it. We did, by the way. See, virtue is its own reward. You'll have to imagine me rolling my eyes at that point.
"Time for us to head home too?" Conrad looked up at me and nodded cheerfully. We like going home and we both have nice fat payments to stash away. It's odd, there is a set tariff of charges for me doing my things, but I've never heard Conrad ask for payment for the work he does. Yet people give him money anyway. Lots of it and Lillith manages it for him. She manages my stash of cash as well and I'm better-off now than I've ever been.
We were about to start packing when the telephone rang. "Angel? It's Daniel here. Thank God I caught you. We need your help again."
"Conrad's right here. Con . . . "
"No, Angel, you don’t understand. We need your help. Conrad's too of course, but this time around, we need yours most of all."
I didn't like the sound of that. "What's the problem?"
"We've been chasing the Byrtus children and we've discovered they have links to a radical cult. That cult has what they call a refuge out near Brno and we think it is a good possibility they are inside. IF we confirm that, we may have to go in and get them and we don’t have a SWAT team."
"Good for you. We'll be there."
Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
The nice thing about Czechia is that it avoided nearly all the damage from the War and has character. Svobody Square is a good example; its mostly 19th century style and earlier with a couple of new buildings filling in gaps. The police station is one such gap-filler, obviously built in the 1970s. I don’t know what happened there. Anyway, our air taxi brought us down from Prague and the staff in the station were waiting for us. The desk crew had obviously been told I was coming because they didn’t even shudder when they saw my boys.
"Angel, Conrad, thank you for getting down here so fast." Daniel had obviously heard us arrive but Lenka wasn't with him. I'd got the impression the two worked closely together. "We did a background check on the suspects and found some rather disturbing information. They were going to the local gymnasium, that's what we call high schools. Until about a year ago, they were just normal kids but they started to become abnormal. They froze everybody else out, kept themselves to themselves and their whole behavior pattern changed. Their school-fellows reacted by freezing them out as well and started to spread rumors they were having a sexual relationship. The situation started to go down from there. Their dress sense changed. . . "
"Let me guess, lot of black, long coats, girl wore heavy, over-dramatic makeup?" Conrad sounded warily familiar with the case.
Daniel looked at the reports in a file and nodded. "Exactly. How did you know?"
"Standard behavior change for somebody about to do a spree-killing. I suspect the other students were right; the two had initiated a sexual relationship that cut them off from everybody else. You got this from the school principal?"
"We call school principals the Feditel but yes. And their main teacher, their Ucitel. Both described their attitudes and behavior as extremely unhealthy."
"They're lucky. If they were building up to a killing spree at the school, it's probable the family massacre got in first by a whisker." Conrad knows people and usually I take his assessments as gospel.
"It's the clothes that gave them away, Every one of these spree-killings involves long black coats. If we institute long black coat control, these spree-killings would end." I was agreeing with Conrad for the simple reason I know massacres. From our different backgrounds, Conrad and I were in complete synch on this. Outlaw long black coats. It's for the children.
"It's not just teenage boys who have a strong sex-drive. Their sisters do too, and the sister can often be more available and a lot more receptive. In fact, there's a very good chance the sister is the dominant one in the relationship. She's a year or so older remember. At that age, a year or so makes a big difference." Conrad paused for a second and gave me a sideways glance. "Usually."
Daniel looked confused, so I took mercy on him. "I made my first kill when I was twelve. By fourteen, I was as hard as they come. When I worked with an adult, I was in charge and gave the orders."
"I'd never have guessed." Daniel said that a bit drily and I reminded myself not to underestimate him. He was the most dangerous kind of policeman, the one who seems harmless and inoffensive right up to the moment he slaps the cuffs on you. "Anyway, we went back to the Byrtus mansion and made another search of the suspect's rooms. Both rooms were badly burned but we found a few things of interest. Then we found Zofia Byrtus's computer, thrown under the bed in Ludvik Byrtus's room. The file cabinets had been wiped of course but we were able to restore most of the files. There was a lot of propaganda material on it from the Radiační Obranná Liga.
"What is that when it is at home?" Conrad was curious. It wasn't often he ran across an organization he had never heard of.
"The Radiation Defense League." Daniel hesitated, remembering he was speaking to people who were, theoretically at least, Americans. "After the Big One, the north-east of the country was swept by fallout. The government and the Americans came in and cleared it all up. Nobody knew about hot-spots back then so they missed some and other areas weren't cleared as well as they might have been. The government prides itself that they did as well as anybody could under the circumstances, but some people died from the radiation and others got sick. The ROL though claimed that the people living in the north east were left to die as an experiment while the rich people went to live in the south west. They also claim there was a gigantic conspiracy theory to cover it all up. They had a lot of support once but as people from the immediate post-war era died off, they shrank into irrelevance. These days, almost nobody really takes them seriously. All that is left is a hard core though that has shut themselves off from the rest of society and claim they are protecting themselves from the evil government who still want to experiment on anybody else. Their primary shelter is a bit west of here. It's fairly obvious from the files we found that Ludvig and Zofia are, or have become, strong supporters of the group and we think it's likely that they have taken cover in the shelter there."
"Did you find anything else interesting?"
Daniel shifted his feet a bit uncomfortably. "Quite a bit of femdom pornography. Which fits what you two were saying about the girl being the dominant member of the pair."
"How many of these 'shelters' do the Radiační Obranná Liga have?" Conrad was obviously worried about people storming into the shelter and finding neither of the Byrtus children were there. A lot of innocent people could get hurt that way.
"The one main one and half a dozen others scattered around the south-west."
"That's the ones you know about." I wasn't going to let that one pass. Daniel was making some very dangerous assumptions. I recognized them because the 14K uses the same technique to mask our activities. We have our "houses" which are semi-public. Know who to ask and you can find out where your local one is easily enough. One or two even have signs outside but that depends on the legal standing of the Triads there. But we also have places that are very closely-guarded secrets. I was prepared to bet a lot of money the ROL did the same.
"I know." Daniel glanced around. "Lenka has gone undercover and is doing a recon of the main shelter. If she spots the Byrtus children, she'll let us know."
I winced. All right people, here's a commandment for you. Never, ever admit you have somebody undercover somewhere. You do, you've just painted a target on their back. Look at it this way, if you have somebody in their place, they could just as easily have somebody in yours. "Daniel, do you have an extraction plan?"
Daniel shook his head. I was afraid of that. "Angel, we were hoping you could help us here. I said we don’t have a SWAT team or anything like it. Can you help?"
"You want me to bring in a street combat team? I can do that, for a price, but why? You already have a perfectly good option, ask the Czech Army. They have a well-regarded special forces unit and they'll want to avenge one of their own. And they can present evidence in court afterwards. You can’t put a member of a Jiētóu Zhàndòu on the stand and expect to get a conviction based on their evidence."
"This is Army work, Daniel, leave it to the Army." Conrad made it sound like he was giving independent advice but actually he was quoting me.
"And don’t waste any time. The clock is ticking on Lenka." A gang of villains like us, well, we play by a set of rules. One of them is we don’t kill cops unless we absolutely have to. Creates too much trouble. San Francisco House had a problem once; they had an FBI agent try and infiltrate them. They clocked him very quickly of course but carefully isolated him and fed him all sorts of fake information. Then, when he had outrun his usefulness, some of the guys took him to a bar for his birthday party and gave him a cake decorated with an FBI shield made of icing on it. I'm told he whimpered. Then, once the party was over, he was returned, alive but completely hammered, to the local field office, complete with his cake. Cults and groups of fanatics like the ROL aren't like that. If they clocked Lenka, they'd kill her by inches. Stupid, I know, but the gods don’t hand out smarts where fanatics are concerned. I guess if they did, they wouldn’t be fanatics.
Daniel nodded and went over to the telephone. Ten minutes later he came back. "All right, Angel, we have a section of our Special Forces coming over. They'll be here in an hour and stay at readiness until Lenka gets the information we need and/or we have to go in and get her.
Outside the Radiační Obranná Liga 'Shelter', Trebic, Czech Republic.
It was now well after dark and the whole situation had gone bad from the start. Lenka had called in and confirmed that the Byrtus children were in the shelter, being treated as heroes. Daniel had ordered her to exfiltrate and meet us at a rendezvous point outside the shelter. Only, she hadn’t been there. That meant we would have to go into the complex with her still inside. Assuming she was still alive of course.
The Czech Army people had turned up, six of them and they carried themselves like professionals. They also had pictures of the complex and thermal images that showed where people were. That imagery seemed to show around two dozen people scattered around the complex. That was another thing. Those people inside were scattered all over the place; taking all of them down at once was going to be hard. Not impossible but hard and we would need a lot of luck.
"Four buildings, Angel. No idea where the objectives are." Sergeant Oskar Suchánek was looking at the pictures as well. "We can come in easily enough, using the trees here as cover, but from there . . ."
I could see what he meant. At least twenty-four people, two of whom were the Byrtus children and one of whom was Lenka. No idea which. Now if they were us, or any organized crime gang come to that, I could have worked it out. We'd have Lenka somewhere safe because she was a very valuable bargaining chip. She was worth a whole lot more alive than dead. It's called thinking ahead. If it was Oskar and his people, they'd have her in the middle with the others spread out in a defensive formation, a proper one. You know, alternate positions, fire plans and all that. The problem was the people in front of us were neither. They were fanatics without any idea of what they were doing, and they hadn’t even considered how this was going to go down.
"How about this. We go into the barn first and take down the two people in there." Suchánek paused for a moment. "Do you think they are the Byrtus couple?"
"Lenka said they were being treated as heroes, I think they'll still be with the main group. Good chance Lenka is in there as well. Entertainment for the evening." Conrad flashed me a warning glance; people who don't know me fail to understand that I can’t feel sympathy for others.
"Colonel Kala should never have sent her in there without proper back-up and cover." Suchánek wasn't angry, just frustrated with civilians who didn’t understand how difficult getting into a place like this was. Or how dangerous staying in there was. Then he realized he might have offended me. He didn’t know, of course, that doing so was nearly impossible. "Sorry, is he a friend of yours?"
"No, Oskar, I don’t have friends. But I agree with you. He's exceeded his skill level here and she's going to pay for it unless we pull this off. The barn first, I think. Nail the two people inside there and we're left with the big group."
"Are you coming in with us?"
I shook my head, watching Oskar trying to hide his relief. "I'll stay back. You've got a trained and experienced team and adding a stranger, not just a stranger but a civilian, will disrupt it. I'll be close behind but out of your way. You need me, just whistle."
"You know how to whistle don't you? You put your lips together and blow." Conrad came out with the movie quote deadpan, but it was apparent that he also had bad feelings about this and was trying to distract himself. There was a ripple of laughter around the briefing session, more from tension than anything else.
On the way in to the ‘shelter’ I got a first-class demonstration of field skills by people who knew what they were doing. I’m not sure if the Czech special forces were trained by the American SEALS but they certainly gave that impression. There’s a sort of hierarchy in this kind of thing. Military special forces are top followed by the professional regular armies. Then come our street combat teams and their equivalents, then, a long way behind, Police SWAT teams followed by armed police response squads, the difference between them is that the armed response teams we have trained know their job is to defuse situations without gunplay if possible. At the bottom come mobs of armed civilians, untrained street thugs and joke armies.
I’ve said before that the trouble with SWAT teams is that they try and combine the jobs of police and soldiers and aren’t any good at either. They’re pretty bad at law enforcement and proper soldiers will wipe the floor with them. Or with us come to that. Professional military forces are even worse at law enforcement, but they are very good at taking down organized armed opposition. I was watching that happen right then.
A pair of the guys slipped into the barn. What happened next was apparently nothing. The two occupants had been taken down in complete silence. One of the troops waved me in and, rather proudly I thought, showed me the two people who'd been in there on the floor, out cold. One of them was snoring loudly and I couldn’t help feeling that his wife must really love him. I secured them both with zip-ties and then stayed behind to watch over them. The movies might say otherwise but zip-ties are quick, not secure, and sufficiently determined people can get out of them easily enough. Hint. Bootlaces. Personally, I would have slit their throats, but there were too many witnesses. Shows you that I can make mistakes as well and that was very nearly a big one.
I was just beginning to get comfortable in the barn when there were two bursts of automatic fire from the house followed by a rapid tattoo of semi-automatic shots. Fairly obvious who were the professionals and who were the amateurs there. After everything had gone quiet again, Oskar came back and waved me in. I could see from the expression that he was not well-pleased by what he had found in there. I got the explanation why through my ear-piece before anything else was forthcoming.
"Angel, are they in there?" It was Conrad's voice and he was in extreme distress. So much so I wanted to run back to him. Don’t understand why.
"In and holding. Don’t know what happened yet, but it didn't sound like a real problem. What's going on?"
"Angel, we've screwed up. Everybody has screwed up. This is nothing like the way we thought it was. There is going to be hell to pay."
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Six
The Radiační Obranná Liga 'Shelter', Trebic, Czech Republic.
"Just how the hell did this happen?" Oskar was mad at, more or less, everybody and with very good reason. We had had the potential here for a major disaster and we'd dodged the bullet by what amounted to a miracle. Well, we'd dodged a bullet; one of the dipshits in this shelter hadn't been so lucky.
"It was my fault." Lenka was holding an iced cloth to her face. She had a pretty bad black eye, the sort that leaves the eyeball bright red, and most of her hair had been crudely hacked off. Compared with what we were expecting, those counted as minor injuries. The man who had hit her had even apologized, not that doing so would save him from an assault charge. "I got in here, found the Byrtus couple and jumped to conclusions. I was calling out when some of the people in here caught me. They knew I was a cop almost instantly and they got really mad. In their eyes they had taken me in when I needed shelter and then I'd ratted them out. That one there hit me, and a couple of the women held me down and started cutting my hair off. That's when the soldiers came in."
I must admit, I thought that was almost funny. Hacking her hair sounded like something teenage girls might do. Then I looked at the two girls who had done it and they were teenagers who reminded me of me at that age. OK, that explained a lot, the only difference being that I was killing people for pay back then. "Oskar, who opened up?"
"That one there." Oskar pointed to a man on the floor with a carbine pointed at his head. "He fired a few shots from one of those civilian semi-automatic carbines. The sear must have slipped because it turned into a burst aimed at us. He lost control of the weapon and hit one of his mates instead. We fired a few shots into the ceiling and that was that. Angel, these people were never threating, not like we were told. This could have been a bloodbath if we'd come in mob-handed."
"It just went off. I didn't mean it." The youth on the floor was crying. It was obvious that how near he had come to dying was sinking in.
"It's possible." Oskar was trying hard to be fair. "Those civilian pistol-carbines are really shoddy. He hit his mate in the ass with it. The victim isn’t seriously hurt, Jotun slapped a field dressing on the wound."
"7.63mm?"
Oskar shook his head. "6.35mm. A toy. Our body armor would stop it dead."
"I've known people killed with .25 ACP, Oskar. Hell, I've done it myself. Any handgun will do the job if the bullet is put in the right place."
"Not in the ass though." One of the team looked up. His medical-gloved hands were bloody, and I guessed he was 'Jotun', the team medic. "This one will be fine."
He looked as if he might have added something else, but people started pouring into the 'shelter', led by Daniel with Conrad close behind him. Conrad got his question in first though. "Angel, is everybody all right?"
"One subject down, slightly wounded, by own goal. None of our people hurt. Lenka's been smacked around and given a haircut but nothing critical."
"Easy for you to say." Lenka had recovered from the shock a little but she was still holding the pad over her eye. The girls who had tried to shave her head had used not-very-sharp hunting knives and it the process they'd skinned areas of her scalp. From personal experience I knew that had to hurt like hell. Also, having one's hair soaked with drying blood isn’t a good experience. She was on the first gurney out to a waiting ambulance. The wounded dipshit on the floor could wait. He had an army field dressing on his butt cheek, what more could he ask for?
"Now is anybody going to tell me what happened?" Oskar looked around, somewhat belligerently. I could understand where he was coming from. Not that pleased myself. Not angry, one of the differences between us and socios is we don’t get angry. We get very cold and calculating when things go wrong. Socios are the ones that go apeshit.
"There was a paperwork screw-up. We got the preliminary autopsy report but not the full and final. In fact, we had no indication there was a full and final coming until it arrived." Conrad was angry as well but hiding it much better than anybody else. "A clerk in Prague decided to take the afternoon off and left to get an early lunch so she could clear for her afternoon early. Didn’t bother to tell anybody there was a collection of top-priority packages waiting to go out and dealt with them the next day, after she'd had her morning coffee and cream cake. They got into head office down here just as you people were going in."
In one corner, Daniel was almost cringing. It was the sort of foul-up that happens but knowing that doesn’t make things much more tolerable when it does. This one could have got a dozen or more people killed. Daniel knew it and also knew that he was going to be held responsible. His career wasn't going to go well afterwards. He should consider himself lucky, If that secretary had been working for us and screwed up like that, she'd be minus a finger or two afterwards. We're not unreasonable people and understand that mistakes and bad luck do happen. Taking unauthorized time off is one thing, not clearing one's duties first is a whole world different.
"Let me guess. Contents were critical?"
Conrad nodded. "It was an outside job after all. All six burned bodies, including the two in the bedroom, thank God, were shot in the head before incineration. The skulls were so badly charred that the bullet holes were missed first time around. That means there were more people involved than we thought. When the forensic people did an inch-by-inch, they found evidence of at least six intruders, not much but it's there. They found the blood from Palova's leg wound under the blood from Jana Byrtus. That confirms Palova died first. There had been an attempt to cover it up and it was fairly well-done. The thing was none of intruders left evidence compatible with our existing suspects. That doesn't quite exclude Zofia and her brother but it's a step on that path. We're back to step one."
"These days, planning the forensic countermeasures takes more time than anything else." I looked around and saw Daniel and Lenka making mental notes of that. "It's true. Sometimes I think we have crimes attached to anti-forensic work rather than anti-forensic work for crimes."
Daniel shook himself and decided this was one of those times when doing nothing was infinitely worse than doing something. "All right, we'll run everybody in this shelter down to the station and hold them for questioning. We'll try and sort this mess out somehow."
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
It would be nice to say that after everything was cleaned up, we all parted on good terms. We didn’t. Everybody was pissed off at everybody else. Oskar and his boys were spitting mad at having been hauled down here and sent into a situation that wasn't just based on faulty information but was totally screwed-up into the bargain. They'd gone away muttering dark comments about making a full report to their superiors. Lenka had just got out of the emergency room after having had what was left of her hair shaved off and her scalp wounds cleaned and disinfected prior to being bandaged. I'd loaned her one of my wooly watch-caps to cover it all up but she knew there was a good chance her hair would grow back patchy. I couldn’t help there; I'm a gun-crazed psychopath, not a hairdresser. I did send a message off to Raw Eddie though.
Conrad was being at his most annoying and in the process demonstrating why so many people don't like him. Admire of course, respect certainly, but not like. At this point he was being passive-aggressively non-judgmentally judgmental and implying that the disastrously miscalculated initial investigation was everybody's fault but his. I made a mental note that I had to sit him down soon and explain to him that because he was Conrad, people in the know would take his deductions at face value. That put a lot of responsibility on his shoulders and he'd better man up and accept it. Remember I said we had rows sometimes? This was shaping up to be one of them.
Something else I've seen over time; Conrad has a remarkably deep understanding of the human condition, yet it doesn’t really extend to why his fellow long-lifers think and act the way they do. Or he does, but the disconnect between people who grew up in entirely different environments and had to adapt to the one we have now hasn't sunk in deep enough to override his subconscious snipes at them. And, of course, he doesn’t realize how different the environment today is for him. That's why he gets so shocked when people try and kill him. I tried to explain that it’s a compliment, but he can’t get his mind around it.
Put it this way, when he's in this kind of mood, people who don’t know us wonder why I haven't shot him yet. Sometimes I do the same.
Anyway, Conrad's only half-here. 'Present in body, not in spirit' is the right phrase. His mind is away somewhere trying to understand what went wrong. That's another thing we need to talk about. He's developed a habit of making deductions early and ignoring contradictory evidence, or the lack of supporting evidence which comes to the same thing. Usually, he gets away with it by being right. This time he wasn't. While he's doing that, I'm interviewing a guy called Josef Drozd who is the local head of the Radiační Obranná Liga. I'm really working hard to try and do things the way Conrad would. It is paying off.
"Do you know how many run-away children there are in Czechia today?" Drozd was being earnest. He obviously had no idea who I am which is curious in its own right.
"Somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand?" I based that on general population data and my own experience. Technically I grew up as a run-away although it was a toss-up who was doing the running.
That made him do a double-take. "That's very close. The official count is 68,500. We think that the real number is at least 50 percent greater than that. The problem is that a lot of kids go home in the evenings but spend the days wandering around on the streets. They're not counted as homeless, but they might as well be. Don’t think they're all poor or destitute either. Some of them come from pretty well-off families. We try and take them in. Those who really are homeless, stay with us. The ones who aren't, help keep the shelters running."
"And the Byrtus children? Second group?"
"Right again." Drozd paused before continuing with an earnest note to his voice. "You probably find this hard to believe but give kids like them something that they can see is worth doing and isn't just make-work and they throw themselves into it. To them school is pointless make-work. It's useless to them and they know it. Zofia and Ludvik knew that they will never have to work for a living so school was a waste of their time. But looking after these deprived kids? They think it's worth doing so they come into the shelter a couple of days a week, help clean up, make meals and so on."
All right, now you're getting a very different picture of what is going on, right? I don’t know about you, but I was getting a really bad smell of us being played for fools by somebody. The question is, who? And, of course, why? "So, what's all this stuff about shelter from radiation and the government experimenting on people?"
Drozd actually laughed. "Years ago, there was a group who thought like that and, to be fair, there was some truth to it. It wasn't deliberate, just that nobody knew any better. Over the years, the original members of the group died out or went away and we evolved into an informal shelter network for the homeless. We keep the old radiation story as a sort of bonding legend so the kids believe they are in a proper community with shared beliefs, but nobody really believes it. It's a bit like Christmas; nobody really believes somebody comes down the chimney and leaves gifts but pretending to believe it helps bond groups"
I could see that although if somebody had come down my chimney in the old days, I'd have shot him first and asked questions later. "How do you fund all this? Buy food and so on?"
"Those rich kids, they bring in money and valuables we can use or sell. They keep us going. Everybody does what they can."
And there, boys and girls we have the money-shot. Literally. Strip away the 'good guys' line and we have a group of adults who are using homeless children and bored, rich adolescents to act as thieves, allegedly bringing in money to help the community. Some goes to running the shelter, sure, the rest goes into the pockets of those doing the running. I don’t really disapprove, to me it comes under the heading of doing well by doing good. Do you know what those homeless kids will end up doing without help like this? Or what their life expectancy is? I do because I was one of them once only I killed people instead of selling myself to them. I never expected to live to see twenty. It still slightly surprises me that I did but who am I to question reality without holding it at gunpoint?
"The intelligence we have on you says that you're a radical cult. That's why we came in the way we did. And why we sent an undercover in ahead of us. Can you explain that?"
"The authorities have it in for us because we have a success rate they can't match. They institutionalize the kids who are put on their care. Those poor little brats are taught to rely on others, to look to the authorities for orders and be good, meek little citizens. Most of them become zombies who never amount to anything. The kids who came to us, most of them end up back in something close to a normal life. Get jobs, settle down, reintegrate with society. You should know, you did."
"You do realize who I am, don’t you?"
"No. I'd assumed you are one of the police here. But, you're no victim, it shows in the way you walk. You make your own way in life. If you're not a cop, then you're a criminal." Drozd paused. "My God, you are, aren't you? You are a serious, big-time organized crime figure. So why the hell are you helping the cops?"
I'll spare you the rest of that conversation. Basically, it was him trying to find out who and what I am and me stopping him. Note though that Drozd has put me on the defensive, something that is very rare and that I don't like at all.
At the end of it all, he was taken back to his cell and Conrad came out of his brown study. "That was well done, Angel."
"Huh? You're always cautioning me not to let the person being interviewed take control. He was trying damned hard to do just that."
"I noticed, that's why I kept quiet. In his efforts to take the interview over, he was telling us far more than he realized. Did you notice how he described you?"
"Sure, he's a psychopath like me. Not surprising Conrad, there's a lot more of us around than people think. I clocked him the moment he walked into the room. He did the same for me."
"Can I ask something Angel? Do you recognize each other the way we do? The sense?"
I thought about it and then shook my head. "Not the same way as people with our gift, no. We don’t have anything like our sense. With us it's attitude and body language. It is the same way we can pick out people who are born victims with a high success rate. The more psychopathic we are, the higher the rate. Last time I was doing my tests with Annemarie, she asked me to help with some trials one of her colleagues was doing. He'd been interviewing psychopaths in prison and had been told that it was very easy to recognize victims by the way they walk and carry themselves. That's true by the way. So he was checking it out. He'd set up a series of tests when psychopathic or sociopathic subjects were presented with some subjects and they had to pick out the victims. Normals scored five to ten percent, socios twenty to twenty-five, us psychos sixty to seventy. What was impressive was that we scored consistently. We may not score hits all the time but the ones we do see all qualified as victims."
"I've got to ask. What did you score?"
"The test for psychopaths scores people on a scale of one to forty. Most people are less than ten. A person who scores twenty to twenty-five is seen as a clinical psychopath and a potential menace to society. My most recent score is 38 and my "spot the victim" score was over 90 percent. My score was the standard against which the others were measured. So, Conrad, don't believe anything Drozd told me. He was trying to play me. Somebody has been playing us ever since we got involved in this case and he's a good candidate now."
Conrad was being very reflective at that. "Angel, have you noticed something? If we eliminate Zofia and Ludvik from our suspect list, and add the two security guards, we end up with the same number of victims."
"You mean the attackers didn't know about the security guards, thought they had killed everybody, and not realized the kids had got out of there? It's plausible, we have remarked on how similar the kids and the younger serving staff were. I think we need to interview those children. Zofia first."
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
"So what happened that day, Zofia?"
Zofia Byrtus flushed brilliant red and looked down. Conrad was doing the interview and had reached the point where he had established a pattern of the interviewee answering questions almost automatically. He was also being very gentle and perceptively understanding. This is the Conrad people like. "Zofia, we don’t care about what you do in your life, really we don't. There is an old saying, 'there are reasons why bedroom doors have locks.' It's your life and your choices. But we do need to know what happened in the house that day."
Zofia flushed even brighter red. "Ludvik and I were making love when we heard shots and chaos. We're not stupid we know that we could get into a lot of trouble for doing that, so we have an emergency drill worked out. There was a communicating door between our rooms. We told our parents we didn’t like it, that it made us both uncomfortable, and we would like to get rid of it. They understood that we'd reached an age where privacy was a big thing, so they agreed. Ludvik is really good at carpentry, so he installed bookshelves that apparently closed off those doors. Only, one each side is hinged so there is a concealed space in there where we can take cover or use to go between the rooms. If we hear somebody coming, he slides away and hides in there until they've gone."
"Sensible." My comment and my approval of the forethought were both quite genuine. When I'm doing something illegal, I spend hours thinking through what might happen and taking steps to mitigate the possible consequences.
"So what happened then?" Conrad hadn’t objected to my comment. I think he's feeling guilty about his brown study earlier.
"We got dressed in the hiding-hole. Not easy, it's less than a meter long and a bit wider, but we managed it. By then we were hearing shots and screams. Some of the screaming was terrible and two of the shots came from very close to us. We were both terrified, but we stayed silent and hid there until it had quietened a bit. Ludvik and I sneaked out through his room and escaped through the back door at the end of our wing. We didn’t know where else to go so we went to the shelter. They took us in."
"Did you take anything when you left?"
Zofia shook her head. "We were going to take some of Matka's jewelry when we went to the shelter next but we couldn’t get to it with what was happening. Matka has lots of jewels, boxes and boxes of them, so many she doesn't miss the ones we take for the shelter."
Matka is Czech for mother. So that made sense.
Zofia's next question was tentative as if she more than half-knew the answer but was afraid of it. "Is Matka all right? Can I speak to her?"
The Radiační Obranná Liga 'Shelter', Trebic, Czech Republic.
"Just how the hell did this happen?" Oskar was mad at, more or less, everybody and with very good reason. We had had the potential here for a major disaster and we'd dodged the bullet by what amounted to a miracle. Well, we'd dodged a bullet; one of the dipshits in this shelter hadn't been so lucky.
"It was my fault." Lenka was holding an iced cloth to her face. She had a pretty bad black eye, the sort that leaves the eyeball bright red, and most of her hair had been crudely hacked off. Compared with what we were expecting, those counted as minor injuries. The man who had hit her had even apologized, not that doing so would save him from an assault charge. "I got in here, found the Byrtus couple and jumped to conclusions. I was calling out when some of the people in here caught me. They knew I was a cop almost instantly and they got really mad. In their eyes they had taken me in when I needed shelter and then I'd ratted them out. That one there hit me, and a couple of the women held me down and started cutting my hair off. That's when the soldiers came in."
I must admit, I thought that was almost funny. Hacking her hair sounded like something teenage girls might do. Then I looked at the two girls who had done it and they were teenagers who reminded me of me at that age. OK, that explained a lot, the only difference being that I was killing people for pay back then. "Oskar, who opened up?"
"That one there." Oskar pointed to a man on the floor with a carbine pointed at his head. "He fired a few shots from one of those civilian semi-automatic carbines. The sear must have slipped because it turned into a burst aimed at us. He lost control of the weapon and hit one of his mates instead. We fired a few shots into the ceiling and that was that. Angel, these people were never threating, not like we were told. This could have been a bloodbath if we'd come in mob-handed."
"It just went off. I didn't mean it." The youth on the floor was crying. It was obvious that how near he had come to dying was sinking in.
"It's possible." Oskar was trying hard to be fair. "Those civilian pistol-carbines are really shoddy. He hit his mate in the ass with it. The victim isn’t seriously hurt, Jotun slapped a field dressing on the wound."
"7.63mm?"
Oskar shook his head. "6.35mm. A toy. Our body armor would stop it dead."
"I've known people killed with .25 ACP, Oskar. Hell, I've done it myself. Any handgun will do the job if the bullet is put in the right place."
"Not in the ass though." One of the team looked up. His medical-gloved hands were bloody, and I guessed he was 'Jotun', the team medic. "This one will be fine."
He looked as if he might have added something else, but people started pouring into the 'shelter', led by Daniel with Conrad close behind him. Conrad got his question in first though. "Angel, is everybody all right?"
"One subject down, slightly wounded, by own goal. None of our people hurt. Lenka's been smacked around and given a haircut but nothing critical."
"Easy for you to say." Lenka had recovered from the shock a little but she was still holding the pad over her eye. The girls who had tried to shave her head had used not-very-sharp hunting knives and it the process they'd skinned areas of her scalp. From personal experience I knew that had to hurt like hell. Also, having one's hair soaked with drying blood isn’t a good experience. She was on the first gurney out to a waiting ambulance. The wounded dipshit on the floor could wait. He had an army field dressing on his butt cheek, what more could he ask for?
"Now is anybody going to tell me what happened?" Oskar looked around, somewhat belligerently. I could understand where he was coming from. Not that pleased myself. Not angry, one of the differences between us and socios is we don’t get angry. We get very cold and calculating when things go wrong. Socios are the ones that go apeshit.
"There was a paperwork screw-up. We got the preliminary autopsy report but not the full and final. In fact, we had no indication there was a full and final coming until it arrived." Conrad was angry as well but hiding it much better than anybody else. "A clerk in Prague decided to take the afternoon off and left to get an early lunch so she could clear for her afternoon early. Didn’t bother to tell anybody there was a collection of top-priority packages waiting to go out and dealt with them the next day, after she'd had her morning coffee and cream cake. They got into head office down here just as you people were going in."
In one corner, Daniel was almost cringing. It was the sort of foul-up that happens but knowing that doesn’t make things much more tolerable when it does. This one could have got a dozen or more people killed. Daniel knew it and also knew that he was going to be held responsible. His career wasn't going to go well afterwards. He should consider himself lucky, If that secretary had been working for us and screwed up like that, she'd be minus a finger or two afterwards. We're not unreasonable people and understand that mistakes and bad luck do happen. Taking unauthorized time off is one thing, not clearing one's duties first is a whole world different.
"Let me guess. Contents were critical?"
Conrad nodded. "It was an outside job after all. All six burned bodies, including the two in the bedroom, thank God, were shot in the head before incineration. The skulls were so badly charred that the bullet holes were missed first time around. That means there were more people involved than we thought. When the forensic people did an inch-by-inch, they found evidence of at least six intruders, not much but it's there. They found the blood from Palova's leg wound under the blood from Jana Byrtus. That confirms Palova died first. There had been an attempt to cover it up and it was fairly well-done. The thing was none of intruders left evidence compatible with our existing suspects. That doesn't quite exclude Zofia and her brother but it's a step on that path. We're back to step one."
"These days, planning the forensic countermeasures takes more time than anything else." I looked around and saw Daniel and Lenka making mental notes of that. "It's true. Sometimes I think we have crimes attached to anti-forensic work rather than anti-forensic work for crimes."
Daniel shook himself and decided this was one of those times when doing nothing was infinitely worse than doing something. "All right, we'll run everybody in this shelter down to the station and hold them for questioning. We'll try and sort this mess out somehow."
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
It would be nice to say that after everything was cleaned up, we all parted on good terms. We didn’t. Everybody was pissed off at everybody else. Oskar and his boys were spitting mad at having been hauled down here and sent into a situation that wasn't just based on faulty information but was totally screwed-up into the bargain. They'd gone away muttering dark comments about making a full report to their superiors. Lenka had just got out of the emergency room after having had what was left of her hair shaved off and her scalp wounds cleaned and disinfected prior to being bandaged. I'd loaned her one of my wooly watch-caps to cover it all up but she knew there was a good chance her hair would grow back patchy. I couldn’t help there; I'm a gun-crazed psychopath, not a hairdresser. I did send a message off to Raw Eddie though.
Conrad was being at his most annoying and in the process demonstrating why so many people don't like him. Admire of course, respect certainly, but not like. At this point he was being passive-aggressively non-judgmentally judgmental and implying that the disastrously miscalculated initial investigation was everybody's fault but his. I made a mental note that I had to sit him down soon and explain to him that because he was Conrad, people in the know would take his deductions at face value. That put a lot of responsibility on his shoulders and he'd better man up and accept it. Remember I said we had rows sometimes? This was shaping up to be one of them.
Something else I've seen over time; Conrad has a remarkably deep understanding of the human condition, yet it doesn’t really extend to why his fellow long-lifers think and act the way they do. Or he does, but the disconnect between people who grew up in entirely different environments and had to adapt to the one we have now hasn't sunk in deep enough to override his subconscious snipes at them. And, of course, he doesn’t realize how different the environment today is for him. That's why he gets so shocked when people try and kill him. I tried to explain that it’s a compliment, but he can’t get his mind around it.
Put it this way, when he's in this kind of mood, people who don’t know us wonder why I haven't shot him yet. Sometimes I do the same.
Anyway, Conrad's only half-here. 'Present in body, not in spirit' is the right phrase. His mind is away somewhere trying to understand what went wrong. That's another thing we need to talk about. He's developed a habit of making deductions early and ignoring contradictory evidence, or the lack of supporting evidence which comes to the same thing. Usually, he gets away with it by being right. This time he wasn't. While he's doing that, I'm interviewing a guy called Josef Drozd who is the local head of the Radiační Obranná Liga. I'm really working hard to try and do things the way Conrad would. It is paying off.
"Do you know how many run-away children there are in Czechia today?" Drozd was being earnest. He obviously had no idea who I am which is curious in its own right.
"Somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand?" I based that on general population data and my own experience. Technically I grew up as a run-away although it was a toss-up who was doing the running.
That made him do a double-take. "That's very close. The official count is 68,500. We think that the real number is at least 50 percent greater than that. The problem is that a lot of kids go home in the evenings but spend the days wandering around on the streets. They're not counted as homeless, but they might as well be. Don’t think they're all poor or destitute either. Some of them come from pretty well-off families. We try and take them in. Those who really are homeless, stay with us. The ones who aren't, help keep the shelters running."
"And the Byrtus children? Second group?"
"Right again." Drozd paused before continuing with an earnest note to his voice. "You probably find this hard to believe but give kids like them something that they can see is worth doing and isn't just make-work and they throw themselves into it. To them school is pointless make-work. It's useless to them and they know it. Zofia and Ludvik knew that they will never have to work for a living so school was a waste of their time. But looking after these deprived kids? They think it's worth doing so they come into the shelter a couple of days a week, help clean up, make meals and so on."
All right, now you're getting a very different picture of what is going on, right? I don’t know about you, but I was getting a really bad smell of us being played for fools by somebody. The question is, who? And, of course, why? "So, what's all this stuff about shelter from radiation and the government experimenting on people?"
Drozd actually laughed. "Years ago, there was a group who thought like that and, to be fair, there was some truth to it. It wasn't deliberate, just that nobody knew any better. Over the years, the original members of the group died out or went away and we evolved into an informal shelter network for the homeless. We keep the old radiation story as a sort of bonding legend so the kids believe they are in a proper community with shared beliefs, but nobody really believes it. It's a bit like Christmas; nobody really believes somebody comes down the chimney and leaves gifts but pretending to believe it helps bond groups"
I could see that although if somebody had come down my chimney in the old days, I'd have shot him first and asked questions later. "How do you fund all this? Buy food and so on?"
"Those rich kids, they bring in money and valuables we can use or sell. They keep us going. Everybody does what they can."
And there, boys and girls we have the money-shot. Literally. Strip away the 'good guys' line and we have a group of adults who are using homeless children and bored, rich adolescents to act as thieves, allegedly bringing in money to help the community. Some goes to running the shelter, sure, the rest goes into the pockets of those doing the running. I don’t really disapprove, to me it comes under the heading of doing well by doing good. Do you know what those homeless kids will end up doing without help like this? Or what their life expectancy is? I do because I was one of them once only I killed people instead of selling myself to them. I never expected to live to see twenty. It still slightly surprises me that I did but who am I to question reality without holding it at gunpoint?
"The intelligence we have on you says that you're a radical cult. That's why we came in the way we did. And why we sent an undercover in ahead of us. Can you explain that?"
"The authorities have it in for us because we have a success rate they can't match. They institutionalize the kids who are put on their care. Those poor little brats are taught to rely on others, to look to the authorities for orders and be good, meek little citizens. Most of them become zombies who never amount to anything. The kids who came to us, most of them end up back in something close to a normal life. Get jobs, settle down, reintegrate with society. You should know, you did."
"You do realize who I am, don’t you?"
"No. I'd assumed you are one of the police here. But, you're no victim, it shows in the way you walk. You make your own way in life. If you're not a cop, then you're a criminal." Drozd paused. "My God, you are, aren't you? You are a serious, big-time organized crime figure. So why the hell are you helping the cops?"
I'll spare you the rest of that conversation. Basically, it was him trying to find out who and what I am and me stopping him. Note though that Drozd has put me on the defensive, something that is very rare and that I don't like at all.
At the end of it all, he was taken back to his cell and Conrad came out of his brown study. "That was well done, Angel."
"Huh? You're always cautioning me not to let the person being interviewed take control. He was trying damned hard to do just that."
"I noticed, that's why I kept quiet. In his efforts to take the interview over, he was telling us far more than he realized. Did you notice how he described you?"
"Sure, he's a psychopath like me. Not surprising Conrad, there's a lot more of us around than people think. I clocked him the moment he walked into the room. He did the same for me."
"Can I ask something Angel? Do you recognize each other the way we do? The sense?"
I thought about it and then shook my head. "Not the same way as people with our gift, no. We don’t have anything like our sense. With us it's attitude and body language. It is the same way we can pick out people who are born victims with a high success rate. The more psychopathic we are, the higher the rate. Last time I was doing my tests with Annemarie, she asked me to help with some trials one of her colleagues was doing. He'd been interviewing psychopaths in prison and had been told that it was very easy to recognize victims by the way they walk and carry themselves. That's true by the way. So he was checking it out. He'd set up a series of tests when psychopathic or sociopathic subjects were presented with some subjects and they had to pick out the victims. Normals scored five to ten percent, socios twenty to twenty-five, us psychos sixty to seventy. What was impressive was that we scored consistently. We may not score hits all the time but the ones we do see all qualified as victims."
"I've got to ask. What did you score?"
"The test for psychopaths scores people on a scale of one to forty. Most people are less than ten. A person who scores twenty to twenty-five is seen as a clinical psychopath and a potential menace to society. My most recent score is 38 and my "spot the victim" score was over 90 percent. My score was the standard against which the others were measured. So, Conrad, don't believe anything Drozd told me. He was trying to play me. Somebody has been playing us ever since we got involved in this case and he's a good candidate now."
Conrad was being very reflective at that. "Angel, have you noticed something? If we eliminate Zofia and Ludvik from our suspect list, and add the two security guards, we end up with the same number of victims."
"You mean the attackers didn't know about the security guards, thought they had killed everybody, and not realized the kids had got out of there? It's plausible, we have remarked on how similar the kids and the younger serving staff were. I think we need to interview those children. Zofia first."
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
"So what happened that day, Zofia?"
Zofia Byrtus flushed brilliant red and looked down. Conrad was doing the interview and had reached the point where he had established a pattern of the interviewee answering questions almost automatically. He was also being very gentle and perceptively understanding. This is the Conrad people like. "Zofia, we don’t care about what you do in your life, really we don't. There is an old saying, 'there are reasons why bedroom doors have locks.' It's your life and your choices. But we do need to know what happened in the house that day."
Zofia flushed even brighter red. "Ludvik and I were making love when we heard shots and chaos. We're not stupid we know that we could get into a lot of trouble for doing that, so we have an emergency drill worked out. There was a communicating door between our rooms. We told our parents we didn’t like it, that it made us both uncomfortable, and we would like to get rid of it. They understood that we'd reached an age where privacy was a big thing, so they agreed. Ludvik is really good at carpentry, so he installed bookshelves that apparently closed off those doors. Only, one each side is hinged so there is a concealed space in there where we can take cover or use to go between the rooms. If we hear somebody coming, he slides away and hides in there until they've gone."
"Sensible." My comment and my approval of the forethought were both quite genuine. When I'm doing something illegal, I spend hours thinking through what might happen and taking steps to mitigate the possible consequences.
"So what happened then?" Conrad hadn’t objected to my comment. I think he's feeling guilty about his brown study earlier.
"We got dressed in the hiding-hole. Not easy, it's less than a meter long and a bit wider, but we managed it. By then we were hearing shots and screams. Some of the screaming was terrible and two of the shots came from very close to us. We were both terrified, but we stayed silent and hid there until it had quietened a bit. Ludvik and I sneaked out through his room and escaped through the back door at the end of our wing. We didn’t know where else to go so we went to the shelter. They took us in."
"Did you take anything when you left?"
Zofia shook her head. "We were going to take some of Matka's jewelry when we went to the shelter next but we couldn’t get to it with what was happening. Matka has lots of jewels, boxes and boxes of them, so many she doesn't miss the ones we take for the shelter."
Matka is Czech for mother. So that made sense.
Zofia's next question was tentative as if she more than half-knew the answer but was afraid of it. "Is Matka all right? Can I speak to her?"
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Seven
Conference Room, Grandezza Luxury Palace Hotel.
When we booked this room, we grabbed the conference room along with it. It isn't a massive room and it looks old-fashioned, but we didn't care about that. It was a place where we could set up the cork-boards and lock the place up when we weren't using it. We were paying well under the odds for a conference room in a top-rank hotel but the hotel didn’t have any other clients who needed it so some income was better than none. So, there we are, sitting in two of the most comfortable chairs I have ever found in a conference room, staring at an array of empty corkboards.
"What do you think, Angel?"
"These armchairs are great. I'll get them for my conference room."
Conrad sounded slightly exasperated. "I mean about the case."
"We screwed up." The nice thing about being a psychopath is that it's much easier for us to see things the way they are, not the way we'd like them to be. The truth is, for the first time I can remember Conrad, and I have blown something big-time. So we work out what we did wrong and move on.
"We should have known that there had to be more than a couple of people involved. How else could they have found they find the time to bury the bodies of the staff and still be caught mid-torture? And that's only the least of it. Even if we include the extreme brutality, why would the intruders have gone in for mass slaughter? That applies when the motive is revenge or intimidation. Nobody can be intimidated if they are dead." Conrad paused. "We made the evidence fit the theory not the other way around. Stupid thing to do."
Since he was enjoying making himself miserable, I decided to help him along a little. I'm a mean bitch, aren’t I? "We can eliminate Zofia and Ludvik. They honestly didn’t know their mother had been killed. Odd that, I would have thought they had seen it in the newspapers. They were probably too busy looking for somewhere to hide."
"You believe them?"
"About not knowing. Sure. They wanted to see the body. Jana was crucified and then sliced up. Whoever did it started with her face. The way she was left, the kids shouldn’t ever see her like that." Conrad looked surprised at me thinking of that. To be honest, I surprised myself.
Conrad sighed deeply. The knowledge that he had wrongly identified them as the killers was weighing deep on him. "That explains one thing though. If the attackers had just wanted to know where the valuables were, she'd have told them to save her children. We know that the intruders got the identities mixed up, probably presumed the two security guards were domestic staff and two of the real staff were killed in place of the children. Probably they are the two in the bedroom. Whatever. Jana knew it. She knew her staff, knew the bodyguards and realized the attackers had made an identification mistake. From that she also realized her children had to be hiding somewhere."
"So she kept her mouth shut to the attackers would concentrate on her and give her kids a chance to escape. Gutsy decision."
"She knew they were going to kill her, and her baby would die with her. This was the only way she had a chance to save her other children. As you say, a decision that took immense courage. I think I've only come across its equal once before." Conrad got up and pinned a single card to the "motive" board. It read 'robbery'. That one act made everything look different. "We were so overwhelmed by the viciousness of this crime, we jumped to 'revenge' dismissed all the other possibilities present."
"Not just us, Conrad. Everybody did. We just led the pack. The chain of logic was quite correct, it was that first step where we screwed up. We'll have to be careful not to do that again. Like now. What other options do we have?"
Conrad thought about the situation. "The only one that really rings true is hiding a crime. But how? So, let's do it right and ask the question we should have done. If this was a robbery gone horribly wrong, why here? If it’s covering up a crime, what crime."
"Big house, rich man, lots of loot." Apparently, a simple question with an obvious answer but in reality, nothing of the sort. "The real question is why was it done this way?"
"How would you have done this, Angel?"
That made me think. I haven't robbed a house like this for years and I would never have done it this way. The very fact we are here tells you why. Home invasions are simply too much trouble and there are so many people involved, one is bound to get caught and rat out the rest. "I'd cat-burglar the place at night. Do it right and the inhabitants wouldn’t know I'd been there until they started to find things had gone missing. Much easier than this mess. I'd do a lot of research, watching the place and so on. It's not easy; hiding a safe is no big deal. You said the main problem, time. This is a big house. It would take time to find the loot and most burglars just don’t have it. That's why professional burglars always case the target thoroughly. But you should be asking Iggie about this."
"I know but she isn’t here. A maid or servant?" Conrad had a half-smirk on his face. Obviously, he knew something I didn’t, and I was about to find out what.
"That's the best way, especially if the locale is a hotel. Maids in particular are usually treated fairly badly by the guests and for some, dropping a dime on a client and tipping a thief off about some vulnerable valuables is fair revenge. Can't say I disagree. A lot of hotel guests seem to think the room rate includes the maid."
Conrad agreed but his smirk grew slightly. "I had a case like that many years ago. In a New York hotel. A couple were staying there, and the wife was found clubbed to death. The maid was accused; the substance of the case being that the wife had caught her burgling the room and had been killed for her trouble. I was asked to look into it by the maid's cousin. Cutting a long story short, the husband did it; his wife had been having an affair and he'd killed her. The evidence against the maid was real enough but it had actually pointed to her working with a jewel thief, spotting targets just like you said. I kept quiet about that part of it. Nobody else had been accused of those robberies and it didn't change the fact that she hadn’t been guilty of the killing."
"I bet her partner appreciated that." One risk of working with partners is that if they get caught doing something else, they'll rat us out to get a deal. That nearly happened to me a couple of times; adult men don't like teenage girls ordering them around. A few tried to get their revenge by ratting me out but they all mysteriously disappeared on a variety of dark and stormy nights. After that, word got around and the problem went away. "Did you get a nice present?"
Conrad shook his head. I snorted. "You would have done if you'd done that for us."
"Maids." Conrad sounded pensive suddenly. "Spot targets because they are in and out of the rooms all day. Now who else do we know who did that in the Byrtus house?"
"Other than the domestic staff who seem to be loyal?" A good reason to treat servants well is that loyalty must go down before it will come back up. Discontented or abused servants are a near-perfect source of information for us villains. Yet preliminary investigations showed that the Byrtus family were known for treating their employees well, to the point there was a waiting list of positions in their household. That left only two real possibilities. "The obvious candidates are Zofia and Ludvik. And we know they were stealing things for the shelter. Or so they thought. You think they were target spotting?"
Conrad thought about that for several minutes. "Yes…. and no."
"Conrad, you are not being indecisive, are you?" I could almost see Humpty giving him an up-form-under look.
"Not really. Yes they did tell Drozd a lot about the house, where things were and who was there when. I don't think they knew they were doing that though. I think they were just chatting awhile he directed the conversation into areas he wanted it to go. You've often warned me about how manipulative people like him are."
"You meant people like me." I grinned to show him I didn't mind the comment. Why should I? It's true. "We need to get the kids in to discuss this."
"And we need to get Dannie and Lenka to search through the records to see if this Radiační Obranná Liga is associated with any more break-ins."
"Give me half an hour, Conrad. I have to make a telephone call. Why don’t you call Dannie and tell him what we need."
Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
It wasn't easy, it never is. If the connection was obvious, somebody would have spotted it especially where the target is already under suspicion of radical and/or terrorist actions. Most cases are uncovered, if not solved, by random accidents. Kid falls off his bicycle into a river and finds a body down there, that sort of thing. Minimizing that risk takes a lot of care and even then the chance that something will go wrong is always there.
The problem was linking any robberies, home invasions or burglaries to the Radiační Obranná Liga. There were plenty of candidate crimes but there was no way we could think of for linking them to any of the so-called shelters. There was a firewall there, one that seemed impossible to breach. I made a few telephone calls and managed to eliminate a few of the robberies on the grounds that we knew who had done them even if the police did not. That barely scratched the surface though.
It was Lenka who made the first crack in that wall. She was actually late to the meeting having been testifying at the preliminary hearing for the two girls who had tried to shave her head. They'd gone into the court giggling and treating the whole thing as some big joke. It didn't sink in how much trouble they were in until the magistrate remanded them for trial on charges that could put them in jail for a minimum of five years each. Their defense that "it was just a prank" hadn’t gone down at all well. The Czech Republic police were pacing the hearings so as to keep as many of the Radiační Obranná Liga leaders in custody as possible. Anyway, Conrad had explained the problem to her. She had thought about it and then noted that the wealthier of the children who had frequented the Radiační Obranná Liga shelters may well have disappeared as totally as the destitute runaways.
Comparing the lists of better-off homes that had been raided with lists of children from those homes who had subsequently disappeared gave us something we could work with. In fact, it gave us two things. One was house raids that could be linked to the Radiační Obranná Liga. The other was children who could be linked to that cult.
There is a thing called a Venn diagram that shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets. These diagrams depict elements as points in the plane and sets as regions inside closed curves. A Venn diagram consists of multiple overlapping closed curves, usually circles, each representing a set. Here we have only two sets and three circles. There was a diagram for that which showed those three circles. Sure enough, there was a single small area that was intensely interesting. It showed houses that had been raided and where the children had been associated with the Radiační Obranná Liga but had not disappeared. That meant we could talk to them as soon as they could be brought in. The warrants went out in minutes. In the meantime, we had two people who fitted into the same niche already in custody.
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
"What was it like in the Shelter?" Conrad was leaning forward slightly, all his body language telling everybody who looked that he was deeply interested in the answers. But then it always does. I've come to the conclusion he manipulates his body language as much as I do mine.
"It was all right at first." Zofia sounded thoughtful. "It was relaxed, people could do more or less what they wanted. The food wasn't great but the kids off the street found anything better than nothing. The people there were great; they would talk with us, discuss our problems. There was an underlying weirdness though. Hard to describe but sometimes the questions were just a little bit too personal. And as time went on, there was just a little bit too much emphasis on money."
"A little too personal?" Conrad picking up on nuances again.
"They knew we slept together whenever we could. Every so often they'd slip in an . . . intimate question." Zofia thought for a second. "I kept wondering why until…."
Ludvik cut in before she finished. "Josef was always nice. We'd talk for hours sometimes. He was concerned that Zofia and me were giving too much money for the shelter and we'd be arrested."
All four of us tried to ask the same question right then but Zofia got in first. "And what did you say?"
Ludvik visibly flinched at the ice in her voice. Conrad had been right as usual, she was the dominant member of the pair. "I told him there was no need to worry, that Matka had boxes of jewelry hidden away. So much even she didn’t really know what was there and she didn’t miss the stuff we were taking."
The sound of the smack as Zofia slapped him across the back of the head echoed around the room. "You stupid little brat. I told you, never tell anybody there anything about home. You might as well have killed our mother yourself."
"I don’t. " Conrad understood the full cruelty of what she had just said, and it shocked him.
"Conrad, Zofia's right. Every criminal in the world is looking for one big score and Josef Drozd had just seen his." I looked at Ludvik who was holding his head and sniveling, then at Zofia. "You can hit him again if you like."
“No, he’s my kid brother. I have to look after him. Even when he acts like an idiot.” She glowered at her brother. "Especially when he acts like an idiot."
"Jana was your birth mother?" We'd got everything else wrong so the family relationships might be as well. I thought I'd better check.
"She and Tatka married when she was young. No older than I am now. I came first and then Ludvik. Matka always treated me more like a little sister than a daughter. We were happy." Zofia glared at me and I returned the look with interest. She flinched and looked down. "We were, really. When we heard another baby was coming, we had a celebration. Matka couldn’t drink of course so she had apple juice instead of champagne."
"Yet you stole some of her jewelry?" See what I mean about Conrad drawing the net in?
"She had lots, far more than she ever wore, and most of it collected dust. When one of the maids got married, Marka gave her nice jewelry to wear at the wedding and then let her keep it. She'd have given it to us if we had asked."
Conrad said nothing; the next question didn't need words. Zofia bit her lip. "Well. Stealing it was more exciting."
That was a money-shot as well. I don’t know if Zofia was telling the truth about how happy the family was but she had just admitted that she and her brother were bored. They were doing things for excitement rather than need. That led to me thinking of something else. The pictures on her lap-top. I glanced at Conrad and he half-winked at me. He'd picked it up as well.
"And the Radiační Obranná Liga was exciting as well? We found your computer, Zofia. Didn't you know that wiping your cyberweb file lockers doesn't erase the content?"
That's a bit rich coming from Conrad. A computer expert he is not. We had to call Ai over once when he'd managed to lock us out of our own computer at home.
"Oh it's always exciting to believe that we know something other people don’t. I don’t think anybody at the Radiační Obranná Liga shelter believed that stuff, but it was fun to pretend it was true. I used to go to discussion groups and pretend it was true and argue with people. That's why I had all the ROL propaganda . . . " Zofia suddenly halted. "What do you mean I wiped it?"
"All the file lockers on your computer account were wiped. Erased. All of them." Conrad put the emphasis on the word 'all'. Zofia is smart, impressively smart and picked up on it right away.
"My pictures? Somebody wiped my pictures?" I saw Conrad look up sharply. He'd picked up on something I hadn’t.
"Tried to. The police forensic people recovered almost everything in your cabinets. It's amazing what a search warrant will achieve."
"Oh, thank God for that. I've been kicking myself for leaving that computer behind. Those pictures are my evidence."
Conference Room, Grandezza Luxury Palace Hotel.
When we booked this room, we grabbed the conference room along with it. It isn't a massive room and it looks old-fashioned, but we didn't care about that. It was a place where we could set up the cork-boards and lock the place up when we weren't using it. We were paying well under the odds for a conference room in a top-rank hotel but the hotel didn’t have any other clients who needed it so some income was better than none. So, there we are, sitting in two of the most comfortable chairs I have ever found in a conference room, staring at an array of empty corkboards.
"What do you think, Angel?"
"These armchairs are great. I'll get them for my conference room."
Conrad sounded slightly exasperated. "I mean about the case."
"We screwed up." The nice thing about being a psychopath is that it's much easier for us to see things the way they are, not the way we'd like them to be. The truth is, for the first time I can remember Conrad, and I have blown something big-time. So we work out what we did wrong and move on.
"We should have known that there had to be more than a couple of people involved. How else could they have found they find the time to bury the bodies of the staff and still be caught mid-torture? And that's only the least of it. Even if we include the extreme brutality, why would the intruders have gone in for mass slaughter? That applies when the motive is revenge or intimidation. Nobody can be intimidated if they are dead." Conrad paused. "We made the evidence fit the theory not the other way around. Stupid thing to do."
Since he was enjoying making himself miserable, I decided to help him along a little. I'm a mean bitch, aren’t I? "We can eliminate Zofia and Ludvik. They honestly didn’t know their mother had been killed. Odd that, I would have thought they had seen it in the newspapers. They were probably too busy looking for somewhere to hide."
"You believe them?"
"About not knowing. Sure. They wanted to see the body. Jana was crucified and then sliced up. Whoever did it started with her face. The way she was left, the kids shouldn’t ever see her like that." Conrad looked surprised at me thinking of that. To be honest, I surprised myself.
Conrad sighed deeply. The knowledge that he had wrongly identified them as the killers was weighing deep on him. "That explains one thing though. If the attackers had just wanted to know where the valuables were, she'd have told them to save her children. We know that the intruders got the identities mixed up, probably presumed the two security guards were domestic staff and two of the real staff were killed in place of the children. Probably they are the two in the bedroom. Whatever. Jana knew it. She knew her staff, knew the bodyguards and realized the attackers had made an identification mistake. From that she also realized her children had to be hiding somewhere."
"So she kept her mouth shut to the attackers would concentrate on her and give her kids a chance to escape. Gutsy decision."
"She knew they were going to kill her, and her baby would die with her. This was the only way she had a chance to save her other children. As you say, a decision that took immense courage. I think I've only come across its equal once before." Conrad got up and pinned a single card to the "motive" board. It read 'robbery'. That one act made everything look different. "We were so overwhelmed by the viciousness of this crime, we jumped to 'revenge' dismissed all the other possibilities present."
"Not just us, Conrad. Everybody did. We just led the pack. The chain of logic was quite correct, it was that first step where we screwed up. We'll have to be careful not to do that again. Like now. What other options do we have?"
Conrad thought about the situation. "The only one that really rings true is hiding a crime. But how? So, let's do it right and ask the question we should have done. If this was a robbery gone horribly wrong, why here? If it’s covering up a crime, what crime."
"Big house, rich man, lots of loot." Apparently, a simple question with an obvious answer but in reality, nothing of the sort. "The real question is why was it done this way?"
"How would you have done this, Angel?"
That made me think. I haven't robbed a house like this for years and I would never have done it this way. The very fact we are here tells you why. Home invasions are simply too much trouble and there are so many people involved, one is bound to get caught and rat out the rest. "I'd cat-burglar the place at night. Do it right and the inhabitants wouldn’t know I'd been there until they started to find things had gone missing. Much easier than this mess. I'd do a lot of research, watching the place and so on. It's not easy; hiding a safe is no big deal. You said the main problem, time. This is a big house. It would take time to find the loot and most burglars just don’t have it. That's why professional burglars always case the target thoroughly. But you should be asking Iggie about this."
"I know but she isn’t here. A maid or servant?" Conrad had a half-smirk on his face. Obviously, he knew something I didn’t, and I was about to find out what.
"That's the best way, especially if the locale is a hotel. Maids in particular are usually treated fairly badly by the guests and for some, dropping a dime on a client and tipping a thief off about some vulnerable valuables is fair revenge. Can't say I disagree. A lot of hotel guests seem to think the room rate includes the maid."
Conrad agreed but his smirk grew slightly. "I had a case like that many years ago. In a New York hotel. A couple were staying there, and the wife was found clubbed to death. The maid was accused; the substance of the case being that the wife had caught her burgling the room and had been killed for her trouble. I was asked to look into it by the maid's cousin. Cutting a long story short, the husband did it; his wife had been having an affair and he'd killed her. The evidence against the maid was real enough but it had actually pointed to her working with a jewel thief, spotting targets just like you said. I kept quiet about that part of it. Nobody else had been accused of those robberies and it didn't change the fact that she hadn’t been guilty of the killing."
"I bet her partner appreciated that." One risk of working with partners is that if they get caught doing something else, they'll rat us out to get a deal. That nearly happened to me a couple of times; adult men don't like teenage girls ordering them around. A few tried to get their revenge by ratting me out but they all mysteriously disappeared on a variety of dark and stormy nights. After that, word got around and the problem went away. "Did you get a nice present?"
Conrad shook his head. I snorted. "You would have done if you'd done that for us."
"Maids." Conrad sounded pensive suddenly. "Spot targets because they are in and out of the rooms all day. Now who else do we know who did that in the Byrtus house?"
"Other than the domestic staff who seem to be loyal?" A good reason to treat servants well is that loyalty must go down before it will come back up. Discontented or abused servants are a near-perfect source of information for us villains. Yet preliminary investigations showed that the Byrtus family were known for treating their employees well, to the point there was a waiting list of positions in their household. That left only two real possibilities. "The obvious candidates are Zofia and Ludvik. And we know they were stealing things for the shelter. Or so they thought. You think they were target spotting?"
Conrad thought about that for several minutes. "Yes…. and no."
"Conrad, you are not being indecisive, are you?" I could almost see Humpty giving him an up-form-under look.
"Not really. Yes they did tell Drozd a lot about the house, where things were and who was there when. I don't think they knew they were doing that though. I think they were just chatting awhile he directed the conversation into areas he wanted it to go. You've often warned me about how manipulative people like him are."
"You meant people like me." I grinned to show him I didn't mind the comment. Why should I? It's true. "We need to get the kids in to discuss this."
"And we need to get Dannie and Lenka to search through the records to see if this Radiační Obranná Liga is associated with any more break-ins."
"Give me half an hour, Conrad. I have to make a telephone call. Why don’t you call Dannie and tell him what we need."
Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
It wasn't easy, it never is. If the connection was obvious, somebody would have spotted it especially where the target is already under suspicion of radical and/or terrorist actions. Most cases are uncovered, if not solved, by random accidents. Kid falls off his bicycle into a river and finds a body down there, that sort of thing. Minimizing that risk takes a lot of care and even then the chance that something will go wrong is always there.
The problem was linking any robberies, home invasions or burglaries to the Radiační Obranná Liga. There were plenty of candidate crimes but there was no way we could think of for linking them to any of the so-called shelters. There was a firewall there, one that seemed impossible to breach. I made a few telephone calls and managed to eliminate a few of the robberies on the grounds that we knew who had done them even if the police did not. That barely scratched the surface though.
It was Lenka who made the first crack in that wall. She was actually late to the meeting having been testifying at the preliminary hearing for the two girls who had tried to shave her head. They'd gone into the court giggling and treating the whole thing as some big joke. It didn't sink in how much trouble they were in until the magistrate remanded them for trial on charges that could put them in jail for a minimum of five years each. Their defense that "it was just a prank" hadn’t gone down at all well. The Czech Republic police were pacing the hearings so as to keep as many of the Radiační Obranná Liga leaders in custody as possible. Anyway, Conrad had explained the problem to her. She had thought about it and then noted that the wealthier of the children who had frequented the Radiační Obranná Liga shelters may well have disappeared as totally as the destitute runaways.
Comparing the lists of better-off homes that had been raided with lists of children from those homes who had subsequently disappeared gave us something we could work with. In fact, it gave us two things. One was house raids that could be linked to the Radiační Obranná Liga. The other was children who could be linked to that cult.
There is a thing called a Venn diagram that shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets. These diagrams depict elements as points in the plane and sets as regions inside closed curves. A Venn diagram consists of multiple overlapping closed curves, usually circles, each representing a set. Here we have only two sets and three circles. There was a diagram for that which showed those three circles. Sure enough, there was a single small area that was intensely interesting. It showed houses that had been raided and where the children had been associated with the Radiační Obranná Liga but had not disappeared. That meant we could talk to them as soon as they could be brought in. The warrants went out in minutes. In the meantime, we had two people who fitted into the same niche already in custody.
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
"What was it like in the Shelter?" Conrad was leaning forward slightly, all his body language telling everybody who looked that he was deeply interested in the answers. But then it always does. I've come to the conclusion he manipulates his body language as much as I do mine.
"It was all right at first." Zofia sounded thoughtful. "It was relaxed, people could do more or less what they wanted. The food wasn't great but the kids off the street found anything better than nothing. The people there were great; they would talk with us, discuss our problems. There was an underlying weirdness though. Hard to describe but sometimes the questions were just a little bit too personal. And as time went on, there was just a little bit too much emphasis on money."
"A little too personal?" Conrad picking up on nuances again.
"They knew we slept together whenever we could. Every so often they'd slip in an . . . intimate question." Zofia thought for a second. "I kept wondering why until…."
Ludvik cut in before she finished. "Josef was always nice. We'd talk for hours sometimes. He was concerned that Zofia and me were giving too much money for the shelter and we'd be arrested."
All four of us tried to ask the same question right then but Zofia got in first. "And what did you say?"
Ludvik visibly flinched at the ice in her voice. Conrad had been right as usual, she was the dominant member of the pair. "I told him there was no need to worry, that Matka had boxes of jewelry hidden away. So much even she didn’t really know what was there and she didn’t miss the stuff we were taking."
The sound of the smack as Zofia slapped him across the back of the head echoed around the room. "You stupid little brat. I told you, never tell anybody there anything about home. You might as well have killed our mother yourself."
"I don’t. " Conrad understood the full cruelty of what she had just said, and it shocked him.
"Conrad, Zofia's right. Every criminal in the world is looking for one big score and Josef Drozd had just seen his." I looked at Ludvik who was holding his head and sniveling, then at Zofia. "You can hit him again if you like."
“No, he’s my kid brother. I have to look after him. Even when he acts like an idiot.” She glowered at her brother. "Especially when he acts like an idiot."
"Jana was your birth mother?" We'd got everything else wrong so the family relationships might be as well. I thought I'd better check.
"She and Tatka married when she was young. No older than I am now. I came first and then Ludvik. Matka always treated me more like a little sister than a daughter. We were happy." Zofia glared at me and I returned the look with interest. She flinched and looked down. "We were, really. When we heard another baby was coming, we had a celebration. Matka couldn’t drink of course so she had apple juice instead of champagne."
"Yet you stole some of her jewelry?" See what I mean about Conrad drawing the net in?
"She had lots, far more than she ever wore, and most of it collected dust. When one of the maids got married, Marka gave her nice jewelry to wear at the wedding and then let her keep it. She'd have given it to us if we had asked."
Conrad said nothing; the next question didn't need words. Zofia bit her lip. "Well. Stealing it was more exciting."
That was a money-shot as well. I don’t know if Zofia was telling the truth about how happy the family was but she had just admitted that she and her brother were bored. They were doing things for excitement rather than need. That led to me thinking of something else. The pictures on her lap-top. I glanced at Conrad and he half-winked at me. He'd picked it up as well.
"And the Radiační Obranná Liga was exciting as well? We found your computer, Zofia. Didn't you know that wiping your cyberweb file lockers doesn't erase the content?"
That's a bit rich coming from Conrad. A computer expert he is not. We had to call Ai over once when he'd managed to lock us out of our own computer at home.
"Oh it's always exciting to believe that we know something other people don’t. I don’t think anybody at the Radiační Obranná Liga shelter believed that stuff, but it was fun to pretend it was true. I used to go to discussion groups and pretend it was true and argue with people. That's why I had all the ROL propaganda . . . " Zofia suddenly halted. "What do you mean I wiped it?"
"All the file lockers on your computer account were wiped. Erased. All of them." Conrad put the emphasis on the word 'all'. Zofia is smart, impressively smart and picked up on it right away.
"My pictures? Somebody wiped my pictures?" I saw Conrad look up sharply. He'd picked up on something I hadn’t.
"Tried to. The police forensic people recovered almost everything in your cabinets. It's amazing what a search warrant will achieve."
"Oh, thank God for that. I've been kicking myself for leaving that computer behind. Those pictures are my evidence."
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Eight
Ludvik Byrtus's Room, Byrtus Estate, Kladruby.
"Take a look at this, Conrad. It's beautiful."
We were in Ludvik's room because Zofia's was burned out. The clean-up crews were elsewhere in the house, removing the mess and generally repairing what they could. One can make a lot of money cleaning up crime scenes when the police are done with them. One can make a lot more by cleaning up crime scenes before the police get to them. Still, they had done their best, and left a note that her bedroom had been soaked with accelerant and was still hazardous. Why it hadn't fireballed was anybody's guess, and I had to admit that Conrad's theory of divine intervention was as good as any. Anyway, it was badly burned, gutted, but Ludvik's wasn't too bad so we worked from there.
The smoke-stains couldn't conceal that the bookcase along one wall really was beautifully done. A series of units, each with a combination of cabinets and shelving. I looked carefully at them but couldn't decide which one of them moved. I did note that they'd been hand-carved, and that work had been very well done. Ludvik really had a serious talent for carpentry.
Conrad, on the other hand, picked one of the units out immediately. Don’t ask me how. He pressed the top and then the bottom, obviously feeling for any sign of movement. Then, he opened the cabinet that formed the bottom three feet or so of the bay and looked inside. It took him a few seconds, but he found the latch, hidden in plain sight as one of the structural supports. After lifting it, he gave a good hard push and the bay slid backwards.
"Now that really is good design. The usual give-away is marks on the floor where the hidden door opens. By arranging the bay to go backwards, you avoided that. Now we step in and go sideways?"
Ludvik nodded proudly. Like any good craftsman, appreciation of his work was the way to his heart. The way in was a bit too small for Conrad but it was all right for me. A little tight but I slid through with Zofia and Ludvik behind me. I wonder if they noticed I never had my back to them?
The concealed area was a bit larger than Zofia had implied. It was a meter wide or so with the bookshelf units stepped away from the remains of the wall to provide extra space. It was also longer than she had implied though, with the separating wall cut back to provide a space about three meters long. Looking around, it was apparent that this hidden space had been used for more than just a hiding place and a link between the rooms. The kids had stored things here that they didn’t want their parents to find and probably played games in here as well. Well, the latter was their business. The things they didn’t want their parents to find though were definitely interesting. Earlier Zofia had hinted that she had collected "evidence" on something. My guess it had been hidden here. Despite the soot and ash from the fire in the next room, I was reasonably sure that if it was here, it had survived.
"Zofia, you mentioned your computer had evidence on it. Evidence of what and did you keep any in here?"
She bit her lip and then nodded. I could sympathize with her; she had obviously made a policy decision not to say any more than she had to. Sensible of her. "Over there. Behind the clothes."
It was actually quite a clever hiding place. Tucked away behind a small collection of "stage" costumes was a box containing a handful of files. I'll be honest, I took a quick look at one of the costumes. It was a 'naughty nurse'. The kids thinking it was erotic was just so cute. Behind it was a fireproof box, probably one her father had bought to keep valuable family documents. I found myself wondering if Zofia and Ludvik's parents had actually known all about what was happening and simply kept quiet about it in the belief that it was a problem that would solve itself in time. Well, that secret had died with them. The box contained more pictures, some taken from the Cyberweb, others by a phone camera.
Zofia had an odd look on her face, one that was both embarrassed and defiant. "I like looking at those sorts of pictures. After a bit I recognized some of the people in them from the shelter."
"I think we'd better discuss this with Conrad."
When we got back into Ludvik's room, Conrad was reading one of the books from the library. It was an account of the American Ulyanov'sk offensive in 1943. Looking at the shelves, a lot of the books were histories of the Russian Front. I explained quickly what I had found, leaving out the kid's private stuff. I'd already decided to tell Conrad if it got to be relevant and not before. As it happened, I didn’t have to.
"You must think we're evil, horrible people." Zofia still had that embarrassed but defiant expression
Conrad looked at her with immense sympathy. "Zofia, Angel and I have met really evil, horrible people and you and Ludvik don't even come close. I admit early on in this case, I thought you might be but I was wrong and did you and your brother a terrible injustice."
"I looked up in the Cyberweb reference library what the Bible says on brothers and sisters sleeping together. It says we should be cursed, exiled, burned and stoned. Not necessarily in that order."
Conrad sighed slightly. "You know, the people who suffer most from the Cyberweb Reference Library are priests and doctors because everybody looks up their symptoms in there and comes to the worst possible conclusions. All right, what you and your brother are doing is wrong, not just because it is condemned in the Bible in very unambiguous terms but because you stand likely to do each other much harm. But before we go any further, always remember God's mercy is infinite and there for the asking. God loves you both and His forgiveness is boundless. Also, you should remember, when you read the Bible, that it was written a long time ago for a different world. Then, if a man and woman slept together on a regular basis, sooner or later, the women would get pregnant. For a brother and sister that is a catastrophe for themselves, their child, their family and everybody around them. So, back then, it was a situation that had to be avoided lest it destroy the social grouping and everybody in it. Even so, I am sure it happened more than the remaining records suggest. In fact, the number of times the prohibition is repeated is evidence for that.
"I think I can see what happened here. Tell me if I'm right. This was a happy, loving family with your mother and father doing the best that a deeply-committed couple could do to make a good life for everybody. Only, they were so attentive to each other, they tended to leave you out. In that void, you and your brother gravitated together. You became very close and, as you matured, your relationship evolved and took a direction that it should not. Modern contraception meant that you don’t have to worry about pregnancy, and you hurt nobody. You experimented with your sexuality of course, all youngsters do, but again, you made sure that nobody was hurt. The truth is you both dealt with the situation in a responsible manner and that partially redeems the fact the situation should never have arisen. The way anybody worthy of the name 'priest' should respond is with sympathy and assistance, not condemnation. The guiding rule is to hate the sin but not the sinner. Angel taught me the meaning of that."
Zofia and Ludvik looked at each other and then at Conrad. I noticed they were holding hands and the expression of relief was tangible. Zofia was nodding in agreement with his words. Conrad smiled gently before continuing. "Look at all the work Ludvik put in here to make sure your secret is safe. That is not the action of somebody who is evil and horrible. Evil required intent to do harm and you have none of that. If I had to describe you, I would say you were misguided, frankly foolish, and that your actions were inappropriate to your relationship. Nothing more than that. I will add though, that while you have gone to great lengths not to hurt others by your relationship, in the long term you are hurting each other. Now, we need to find out what has been happening here."
It turned out that the kids were pretty good detectives. Zofia had spotted several cases where runaway children she had recognized from the "shelter" had turned up in the pictures she had collected from the Cyberweb. Some of the pairings she had marked were a bit doubtful, but others were very clear and unmistakable.
"What did you do about this?" Eventually Conrad had asked the money-shot question.
"I went to see Josef Drozd about it, showed him some of my evidence and warned him that somebody was exploiting the homeless children by paying them for these pictures. He was horrified of course and promised to look into it and drive the people responsible away. He said there was not enough here to take to the police and asked if I had any more evidence; I said I had some more here." Suddenly Zofia clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh my God, it was me. He was the one who is behind these pictures and he sent people to get the rest of the evidence. That's why they . . .. ."
Zofia collapsed, hysterical with the realization of what had happened. Ludvik took her in his arms and rocked her backwards and forwards, whispering comfort into her ear. Conrad and I tried not to watch. He succeeded, I didn’t. It was an interesting display of emotions that I filed away in my library of such things, for future use when convenient. Eventually, when Zofia had calmed down a little, I spoke in my prison voice to Conrad. "We need to change the boards again."
Conrad nodded glumly. This case had not gone well for him. It took Zofia almost half an hour to calm down and by the time she had cried herself out, her face was red and puffy. She looked at me through the film of grief. "Can I see where Matka died?"
I didn't think that was a good idea. The clean-up crews were still working in that area and it was obvious that what had happened there was terrible. Personally, I thought that the kids ought to sell this house and get out of it as soon as possible. That gave me an idea about what to do with Ludvik. Conrad though caught my eye and nodded so I took the kids down.
It wasn't quite as bad as I had expected. Most of the blood had gone from the wall although the damage to the masonry where Jana's hands had been pinned was still visible. There was still blood all over the floor though. There was no way, short of a DNA test, that anybody could tell what had come from Jana and what from Monika Palová. The required testing was in hand, but DNA evidence only comes quickly when circumstances are ideal. This was anything but ideal; for now, it suited everybody to tell the kids that most was from the Palová. Zofia went to where her mother had died, placed her hands on the wall and stood there with her lips moving silently. The cleaners stopped working and stood by while she prayed.
After she was finished, Ludvik turned to the foreman of the cleaning team. "How did my father die?"
The man cleared his throat. "I wasn't part of the investigation, but I spoke with those who were. They think he came in, saw what was happening and ran to rescue your mother. He tried to fight the men around her but there were too many of them. They beat him down and after he was unconscious, they threw him down the stairs. If it's any consolation, he died very bravely."
One of the cleaners looked up and spoke very softly. "He was a real man.”
Outside the building, Zofia took her brother by the hand. "Ludi, we have to part our ways for a while at least. Conrad is right, we can’t go on like this. We only need to make one mistake and we each go to prison for three years. Quite apart from anything else, we have to straighten our lives out."
"I can help there." This was an emotional atmosphere and I didn’t like it. Because, remember, I can never be part of it. I can stand and watch but I can never belong. I have less connection with an emotional event taking place in front of me than I do watching one on television. Sometimes it's good to be that way but this isn't one of those times. For me, and people like me, it’s a cold, lonely world and sometimes the inability to contact anything but coldness and loneliness hurts. Think of standing outside a beautiful garden where everybody is happy and not having the key that lets you in. "I know a woman in England, Sam Woods, who owns and runs a company called Woods Construction. They make houses and she's always short of skilled craftsmen. Also, English houses these days are usually built with a concealed room and often a shelter in the basement so your skill at concealing access is a good start for you. I can get her to give you a position and an apprenticeship. After that it’s up to you. Skilled craftsmen earn pretty good money these days and you'll have your income from the family business as well. Remember, with a good income you can be anything you want to be, want to give it a try?"
"You can organize that, Angel?" Zofia was slowly coming back to life.
"Zo, I'm from the Triads. I can organize anything. Have you thought about what you are going to do?"
"The business Tatka built is ours now. If Ludi is going to England, I suppose I'll have to learn how to run it. That will take time and I don’t know if I've got it."
"Go to university, do a business studies course and get taught everything you need. Saigon Free University is very good, and you'll like Saigon. I love it there. Apply now and you'll be admitted and ready to start by the time we have this mess cleared up. There's a preparatory school you can go to first and then you can do your degree." I didn't mention the Free University of Saigon is one of those places that owes me some serious favors.
"But, what about the business?"
"Your father has probably made some arrangements to run the company until you are old enough to do so. If not, or if you want to have your own person in there as well, my organization will loan you a business manager who will represent you in exchange for a percentage of the gross. Once you're ready to take over, you can." Zofia was looking suspicious. "Look, we're gangsters, you must have realized that. But, we're in things for the long term and we've found that partnerships are much better ways of going about business than anything else. We can make more money working together than either of us can alone. Just think about it, all right? Talk to Sam when we get Ludvik's apprenticeship fixed up. We gave her the same deal and she’s never regretted it. Nor have her children who are set to inherit a much healthier business."
"And Ludi and I will have a world between us." Zofia sounded distressed at the thought. There was no doubt she was.
"Good thing or bad thing, that's up to you." I don’t do comforting. “It’s your life.”
Once we got back to our car, Conrad said very quietly to me "And so the camel gets his nose into another tent?"
Ludvik Byrtus's Room, Byrtus Estate, Kladruby.
"Take a look at this, Conrad. It's beautiful."
We were in Ludvik's room because Zofia's was burned out. The clean-up crews were elsewhere in the house, removing the mess and generally repairing what they could. One can make a lot of money cleaning up crime scenes when the police are done with them. One can make a lot more by cleaning up crime scenes before the police get to them. Still, they had done their best, and left a note that her bedroom had been soaked with accelerant and was still hazardous. Why it hadn't fireballed was anybody's guess, and I had to admit that Conrad's theory of divine intervention was as good as any. Anyway, it was badly burned, gutted, but Ludvik's wasn't too bad so we worked from there.
The smoke-stains couldn't conceal that the bookcase along one wall really was beautifully done. A series of units, each with a combination of cabinets and shelving. I looked carefully at them but couldn't decide which one of them moved. I did note that they'd been hand-carved, and that work had been very well done. Ludvik really had a serious talent for carpentry.
Conrad, on the other hand, picked one of the units out immediately. Don’t ask me how. He pressed the top and then the bottom, obviously feeling for any sign of movement. Then, he opened the cabinet that formed the bottom three feet or so of the bay and looked inside. It took him a few seconds, but he found the latch, hidden in plain sight as one of the structural supports. After lifting it, he gave a good hard push and the bay slid backwards.
"Now that really is good design. The usual give-away is marks on the floor where the hidden door opens. By arranging the bay to go backwards, you avoided that. Now we step in and go sideways?"
Ludvik nodded proudly. Like any good craftsman, appreciation of his work was the way to his heart. The way in was a bit too small for Conrad but it was all right for me. A little tight but I slid through with Zofia and Ludvik behind me. I wonder if they noticed I never had my back to them?
The concealed area was a bit larger than Zofia had implied. It was a meter wide or so with the bookshelf units stepped away from the remains of the wall to provide extra space. It was also longer than she had implied though, with the separating wall cut back to provide a space about three meters long. Looking around, it was apparent that this hidden space had been used for more than just a hiding place and a link between the rooms. The kids had stored things here that they didn’t want their parents to find and probably played games in here as well. Well, the latter was their business. The things they didn’t want their parents to find though were definitely interesting. Earlier Zofia had hinted that she had collected "evidence" on something. My guess it had been hidden here. Despite the soot and ash from the fire in the next room, I was reasonably sure that if it was here, it had survived.
"Zofia, you mentioned your computer had evidence on it. Evidence of what and did you keep any in here?"
She bit her lip and then nodded. I could sympathize with her; she had obviously made a policy decision not to say any more than she had to. Sensible of her. "Over there. Behind the clothes."
It was actually quite a clever hiding place. Tucked away behind a small collection of "stage" costumes was a box containing a handful of files. I'll be honest, I took a quick look at one of the costumes. It was a 'naughty nurse'. The kids thinking it was erotic was just so cute. Behind it was a fireproof box, probably one her father had bought to keep valuable family documents. I found myself wondering if Zofia and Ludvik's parents had actually known all about what was happening and simply kept quiet about it in the belief that it was a problem that would solve itself in time. Well, that secret had died with them. The box contained more pictures, some taken from the Cyberweb, others by a phone camera.
Zofia had an odd look on her face, one that was both embarrassed and defiant. "I like looking at those sorts of pictures. After a bit I recognized some of the people in them from the shelter."
"I think we'd better discuss this with Conrad."
When we got back into Ludvik's room, Conrad was reading one of the books from the library. It was an account of the American Ulyanov'sk offensive in 1943. Looking at the shelves, a lot of the books were histories of the Russian Front. I explained quickly what I had found, leaving out the kid's private stuff. I'd already decided to tell Conrad if it got to be relevant and not before. As it happened, I didn’t have to.
"You must think we're evil, horrible people." Zofia still had that embarrassed but defiant expression
Conrad looked at her with immense sympathy. "Zofia, Angel and I have met really evil, horrible people and you and Ludvik don't even come close. I admit early on in this case, I thought you might be but I was wrong and did you and your brother a terrible injustice."
"I looked up in the Cyberweb reference library what the Bible says on brothers and sisters sleeping together. It says we should be cursed, exiled, burned and stoned. Not necessarily in that order."
Conrad sighed slightly. "You know, the people who suffer most from the Cyberweb Reference Library are priests and doctors because everybody looks up their symptoms in there and comes to the worst possible conclusions. All right, what you and your brother are doing is wrong, not just because it is condemned in the Bible in very unambiguous terms but because you stand likely to do each other much harm. But before we go any further, always remember God's mercy is infinite and there for the asking. God loves you both and His forgiveness is boundless. Also, you should remember, when you read the Bible, that it was written a long time ago for a different world. Then, if a man and woman slept together on a regular basis, sooner or later, the women would get pregnant. For a brother and sister that is a catastrophe for themselves, their child, their family and everybody around them. So, back then, it was a situation that had to be avoided lest it destroy the social grouping and everybody in it. Even so, I am sure it happened more than the remaining records suggest. In fact, the number of times the prohibition is repeated is evidence for that.
"I think I can see what happened here. Tell me if I'm right. This was a happy, loving family with your mother and father doing the best that a deeply-committed couple could do to make a good life for everybody. Only, they were so attentive to each other, they tended to leave you out. In that void, you and your brother gravitated together. You became very close and, as you matured, your relationship evolved and took a direction that it should not. Modern contraception meant that you don’t have to worry about pregnancy, and you hurt nobody. You experimented with your sexuality of course, all youngsters do, but again, you made sure that nobody was hurt. The truth is you both dealt with the situation in a responsible manner and that partially redeems the fact the situation should never have arisen. The way anybody worthy of the name 'priest' should respond is with sympathy and assistance, not condemnation. The guiding rule is to hate the sin but not the sinner. Angel taught me the meaning of that."
Zofia and Ludvik looked at each other and then at Conrad. I noticed they were holding hands and the expression of relief was tangible. Zofia was nodding in agreement with his words. Conrad smiled gently before continuing. "Look at all the work Ludvik put in here to make sure your secret is safe. That is not the action of somebody who is evil and horrible. Evil required intent to do harm and you have none of that. If I had to describe you, I would say you were misguided, frankly foolish, and that your actions were inappropriate to your relationship. Nothing more than that. I will add though, that while you have gone to great lengths not to hurt others by your relationship, in the long term you are hurting each other. Now, we need to find out what has been happening here."
It turned out that the kids were pretty good detectives. Zofia had spotted several cases where runaway children she had recognized from the "shelter" had turned up in the pictures she had collected from the Cyberweb. Some of the pairings she had marked were a bit doubtful, but others were very clear and unmistakable.
"What did you do about this?" Eventually Conrad had asked the money-shot question.
"I went to see Josef Drozd about it, showed him some of my evidence and warned him that somebody was exploiting the homeless children by paying them for these pictures. He was horrified of course and promised to look into it and drive the people responsible away. He said there was not enough here to take to the police and asked if I had any more evidence; I said I had some more here." Suddenly Zofia clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh my God, it was me. He was the one who is behind these pictures and he sent people to get the rest of the evidence. That's why they . . .. ."
Zofia collapsed, hysterical with the realization of what had happened. Ludvik took her in his arms and rocked her backwards and forwards, whispering comfort into her ear. Conrad and I tried not to watch. He succeeded, I didn’t. It was an interesting display of emotions that I filed away in my library of such things, for future use when convenient. Eventually, when Zofia had calmed down a little, I spoke in my prison voice to Conrad. "We need to change the boards again."
Conrad nodded glumly. This case had not gone well for him. It took Zofia almost half an hour to calm down and by the time she had cried herself out, her face was red and puffy. She looked at me through the film of grief. "Can I see where Matka died?"
I didn't think that was a good idea. The clean-up crews were still working in that area and it was obvious that what had happened there was terrible. Personally, I thought that the kids ought to sell this house and get out of it as soon as possible. That gave me an idea about what to do with Ludvik. Conrad though caught my eye and nodded so I took the kids down.
It wasn't quite as bad as I had expected. Most of the blood had gone from the wall although the damage to the masonry where Jana's hands had been pinned was still visible. There was still blood all over the floor though. There was no way, short of a DNA test, that anybody could tell what had come from Jana and what from Monika Palová. The required testing was in hand, but DNA evidence only comes quickly when circumstances are ideal. This was anything but ideal; for now, it suited everybody to tell the kids that most was from the Palová. Zofia went to where her mother had died, placed her hands on the wall and stood there with her lips moving silently. The cleaners stopped working and stood by while she prayed.
After she was finished, Ludvik turned to the foreman of the cleaning team. "How did my father die?"
The man cleared his throat. "I wasn't part of the investigation, but I spoke with those who were. They think he came in, saw what was happening and ran to rescue your mother. He tried to fight the men around her but there were too many of them. They beat him down and after he was unconscious, they threw him down the stairs. If it's any consolation, he died very bravely."
One of the cleaners looked up and spoke very softly. "He was a real man.”
Outside the building, Zofia took her brother by the hand. "Ludi, we have to part our ways for a while at least. Conrad is right, we can’t go on like this. We only need to make one mistake and we each go to prison for three years. Quite apart from anything else, we have to straighten our lives out."
"I can help there." This was an emotional atmosphere and I didn’t like it. Because, remember, I can never be part of it. I can stand and watch but I can never belong. I have less connection with an emotional event taking place in front of me than I do watching one on television. Sometimes it's good to be that way but this isn't one of those times. For me, and people like me, it’s a cold, lonely world and sometimes the inability to contact anything but coldness and loneliness hurts. Think of standing outside a beautiful garden where everybody is happy and not having the key that lets you in. "I know a woman in England, Sam Woods, who owns and runs a company called Woods Construction. They make houses and she's always short of skilled craftsmen. Also, English houses these days are usually built with a concealed room and often a shelter in the basement so your skill at concealing access is a good start for you. I can get her to give you a position and an apprenticeship. After that it’s up to you. Skilled craftsmen earn pretty good money these days and you'll have your income from the family business as well. Remember, with a good income you can be anything you want to be, want to give it a try?"
"You can organize that, Angel?" Zofia was slowly coming back to life.
"Zo, I'm from the Triads. I can organize anything. Have you thought about what you are going to do?"
"The business Tatka built is ours now. If Ludi is going to England, I suppose I'll have to learn how to run it. That will take time and I don’t know if I've got it."
"Go to university, do a business studies course and get taught everything you need. Saigon Free University is very good, and you'll like Saigon. I love it there. Apply now and you'll be admitted and ready to start by the time we have this mess cleared up. There's a preparatory school you can go to first and then you can do your degree." I didn't mention the Free University of Saigon is one of those places that owes me some serious favors.
"But, what about the business?"
"Your father has probably made some arrangements to run the company until you are old enough to do so. If not, or if you want to have your own person in there as well, my organization will loan you a business manager who will represent you in exchange for a percentage of the gross. Once you're ready to take over, you can." Zofia was looking suspicious. "Look, we're gangsters, you must have realized that. But, we're in things for the long term and we've found that partnerships are much better ways of going about business than anything else. We can make more money working together than either of us can alone. Just think about it, all right? Talk to Sam when we get Ludvik's apprenticeship fixed up. We gave her the same deal and she’s never regretted it. Nor have her children who are set to inherit a much healthier business."
"And Ludi and I will have a world between us." Zofia sounded distressed at the thought. There was no doubt she was.
"Good thing or bad thing, that's up to you." I don’t do comforting. “It’s your life.”
Once we got back to our car, Conrad said very quietly to me "And so the camel gets his nose into another tent?"
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Nine
Conference Room, Grandezza Hotel Luxury Palace.
Realizing how badly he had screwed up had been a bad blow for Conrad so to comfort him, I’d had a serious breakfast sent in for us. Big trolley with coffee, a bottle of Bacardi 151 for me, cherry and venison sausages for Conrad and a selection of side dishes. Oh, and a big bowl of scrambled eggs. When Conrad arrived, he was looking a lot better and his eyes lit up when he saw his sausages. “Angel, that’s great. Thank you.”
I made a little wave of 'don’t sweat it' then went back to looking at our boards. "You know, Conrad, there is a systemic mistake in how we've been doing this. We have always been putting up the possible motives on these boards and using a process of elimination to pick out the most likely. But, suppose there are more than a single motive? That there are two or more sets of motives that coincide and reinforce each other? Or even two parallel but separate crimes?"
Conrad thought about that. "I've run across a few cases like that over the years, but they are rare. I suppose that's why they slipped away from my attention. You think the motives were both robbery and concealing a crime?"
"That's right although there were two separate teams carrying out the functions. The overt crime was a home invasion aimed at stealing the vast store of jewelry that was supposed to be hidden in the house. To Josef Drozd that jewelry was his one big score. Every villain is looking for that and he just couldn't resist the temptation. I'm pretty sure he didn’t know about the security guards. I think the kids were careful enough not to mention them. When he knew Pavel Byrtus would be away, that was his opportunity. He hired his group of thugs to do a home-invasion robbery and told them as little as possible. Especially that a lot of people were going to get killed and by the time they found out, they were too committed to pull out.
"Only, buried within that larger crime was another. Either Josef Drozd or the man behind him knew that evidence of the pornography ring was in that house and he wanted it back right away. The hirelings did the initial invasion and later buried all the bodies while Drozd and his subordinates did the hunt inside for the evidence. That explains the time factor; things weren't done in series, they took place in parallel. They found what they were looking for too, or thought they did. Zofia's computer which they hacked and wiped. They completely missed that secret room.
"He probably convinced his minions that, when threatened, Jana wouldn't hold out on the location of the loot. It wasn't worth the potential price. Which, in itself, is probably right but it was only a small part of the story. The rest of the scenario was why Jana was treated the way she was. He knew that if she didn’t give that evidence up, the police would find it, eventually, and put everything together. What he didn’t realize was that she knew nothing about it." I stopped there; it was dangerously close to what had happened in the Inquisition and Conrad had only just got his good humor back. Only the telephone ringing stopped me from calling room service and ordering another plate of venison sausage for him.
The call was to tell me that one of my guests had arrived. I had been busy on the telephone overnight and this was an early product of that effort. Fortunately, Tom Cisneros had been in Budapest and had taken a rotodyne over. He works for a magazine called the National Spectator. Once it had been a sleazy paparazzi magazine specializing in "candid pictures" of famous people doing squalid things. Then, Tom had stumbled across evidence of a human trafficking ring involving the rich and prominent, exposed them and made a name for himself. From there, he had set off investigating a European group called the Ringcluben. He was innocent enough to think he could get away with that and even more naïve enough to believe being a journalist would protect him from dire consequences. By a miracle he'd gotten away with it right up to the point I blew his foot off. Well, he had been holding Cristi by the throat and slamming her head against the wall. He had been terrified and panicking which Conrad tells me is a partial excuse for his actions. I don’t understand why but then I don’t get terrified or panic. I don’t need excuses for what I do either. Excuses are things invented by people with consciences.
If you've been following my little tales, you know the story after that. After he got out of hospital and was fitted with a prosthetic foot, the National Spectator had reinvented itself as the scourge of human trafficking and child abuse. It had reaped the rewards and become an internationally-respected authority on the matter. None of its investigators were more respected than Thomas R Cisneros. He's more cynical than he used to be but personally, I give him another year to eighteen months tops. I can't decide whether he'll just disappear or whether his mangled body will be found as an example to others.
"Hi Tom. Welcome on board. Coffee? Breakfast?"
I've never known a journalist turn down a free feed. Probably, that's why so many of them get poisoned. Journalist's breakfast, omelet blended with cheddar cheese, fresh chives, sour cream and Polonium 210. Tom looked at our breakfast trolley and noted that we had been eating from it. That reassured him a bit so he helped himself to some sausages and scrambled eggs, then tucked in. When I poured myself some coffee and laced it with Bacardi 151, he looked plaintive, so I made him one.
"What you got for me, Angel?" Tom had finally got it through his thick head that high-level organized crime dislikes the cheap and dirty end of human trafficking and the sex trade as much as he does. We're in both, sure, but top-end only and the low-end people attract police attention and thus endanger our profits. I've said this before, but it bears repeating, our policy of involvement only in high-end activities isn't because we're nice people, we aren't. It's because, in the long term, we make more money and our expenses are a lot less.
"We've stumbled across something that looks a lot like an organized trafficking of runaways and what appears to be an adult entertainment operation." Tom leaned forward, obviously interested. I filled up his coffee mug and gave him the outline of what we had learned to date. Eventually I closed the files and looked at him. "First question, is this linked to the Ringcluben? And second question, is the Ringcluben still in business? They should have been the other way around, shouldn’t they?"
Tom looked at my boys and decided to be non-committal on that. I think he is nervous I'll shoot him again. "The second part is a very good question. Ever since the Zuiderzee Affair, people have been asking whether the Ringcluben survived. We know that the organization in Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland and Austria was thoroughly broken up but that doesn't mean everybody involved was arrested. We have strong reason to believe that some of its members fled abroad. Whether the organization existed in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and so on is something I'm investigating now. What you have shown me suggests that it does.
"That also suggests that the situation here is indeed linked to the Ringcluben. How directly is another matter of course? It may be that fugitive members of the original Ringcluben came here and tried to restart their filthy little games or that the "Eastern European" section already existed and took them in. This Radiační Obranná Liga, could it be a cover for the reformed Ringcluben?"
Conrad thought that one over. "It could be, although the original Radiační Obranná Liga dates back to the early 1950s, after The Big One. Of course, we don’t know how far the Ringcluben dates back. It's not impossible they always were parts of the same group and the Radiation thing was a cover. I'd go further, it is quite plausible that the Ringcluben has been around for a very long time under different names. The British Hellfire Club springs to mind there although the legends about it far exceed reality."
"Don't they always? There was a similar sort of group in China, just before the Second World War. Japanese man would kidnap girls and murder them in front of a paying audience. The Wo Hop To picked him up and gave him some of his own medicine. He didn’t survive of course. I doubt if it was connected to this, just saying this sort of thing is wider-spread than one might think."
"Getting people to realize that is one of our most difficult problems. We get dozens of letters every week telling us that we're wrong, that it can't happen in their neighborhood." Tom looked hopefully at his mug. I filled it up with rum-laced coffee. He drank some and sighed. "You know, Angel, it is worth getting one's foot shot off just to experience your definition of hospitality."
"Pleased to be of service, Tom." We clinked mugs and smiled. "There are none so blind as those who will not see. I can’t complain, we benefit from the same thing. Following that thought, have we any hard evidence that we may have a link here?"
"I'm not sure that it counts as evidence, but I did see this in your file on Jana Byrtus." He produced a scene-of-crime picture of Jana Byrtus still hanging on the wall where she had been killed. "Now, this is a picture the Austrian Police took when they raided the Vienna Ringcluben. They were a little too late to save the victim. A few minutes earlier and they might have been in time. Still, that meant they charged everybody with murder."
I looked at Tom's picture. The similarity between it and the one of Jana Byrtus could easily be too great for a coincidence. "I doubt if she wanted to be saved by then; she just wanted to die. Tom, we have a couple of kids coming here soon. Jana Byrtus was their mother. Don't let them see these pictures, they have no idea how bad this was. Conrad, similarity much?"
Conrad took the two prints and shook his head sadly. "That was a kindly thought, Angel. They should never see these. There's a lot of similarity, yes. Whether it is enough for a court to accept, I don’t know. One thing though. This one was taken in Austria. That's not so far away from here. A shortish drive. Could be possible even to walk it. That adds to the possibility of a link."
"One problem there. We smashed up the original Ringcluben two years ago. It appears that this Radiační Obranná Liga based racket has been going on longer than that. So, if they are linked, they must be parts of the same, not one descended from the other. Could I have another one of those sausages, please?" Conrad handed the plate to him. Tom took one and bit the end off. "Angel, you think there were two separate groups involved in this attack?"
"There must be, the timing doesn’t work any other way."
"Well, if I was in the first group, the home invaders, I'd be distinctly worried about my chances of disappearing."
Well color me shocked. Our Tom is getting smart. "At this point, I'm surprised we didn’t find them in the grave with the other victims."
Digging a grave is hard work and takes time. Another thing we had missed in the original investigation. Conrad could be excused that; he doesn’t get rid of inconvenient bodies for a living. I do, and the fault for not spotting this was down to me. There was a villain once who used to offer various people a couple of hundred bucks to help him dig a grave. Of course, anybody who took the offer always ended up in the grave alongside the original victim. That villain made the mistake of offering me that deal, probably assuming that a teenage girl would be dumb enough to take him up on it. He realized how wrong that was when the first of my bullets went through his forehead. He ended up in said grave thus proving that being a patronizing sexist when talking to a gun-crazed psychopathic female is a bad idea. Tom was right, if the decision to kill the first group hadn't been made from the start, it certainly had now. The problem was, we had no idea of who the members of the second group were.
"Have you got enough for a good story, Tom?" Conrad was asking probably the most important question of all.
Tom looked through his notes and thought carefully before answering. "So far, so good. It's a good cautionary tale of how people can get snared by this world without realizing it. But I'll need a good second part to this, a wrap-up if you like. Exclusive of course. I assume neither of you want your names mentioned?"
"Too right." I grunted that response although it was true on multiple levels. We had some more talk on a semi-social level, including Tom asking after Cristi. I told him she was finishing her stint as a general physician on cruise ships and was returning to university for her final studies and examinations as a forensic pathologist. She'd already had a job offer from a forensic and pathology center in London. Tom seemed relieved at that; I had little doubt his attack on her was something he regretted, again on multiple levels.
Eventually, Tom left and that left Conrad and I to examine what we had learned. The odd thing was, we hadn’t been as wrong as we had feared. There was a robbery component to this crime but focusing on that had left out the wider issues. We'd only seen half the picture. Conrad had been beating himself up about wrongly accusing Zofia and Ludvik. A good night's sleep should have calmed him down. But he hadn't had it. His nightmares had come back in full force. He really needed a day's quiet contemplation to put everything in perspective, but he hadn’t had the chance. He'd have to get it when we got home. Fortunately, the workload on Her Highness's special investigations team was pretty light right now.
We'd just cleared up when Danny and Lenka brought the kids in. All four of them looked exhausted so we got a fresh pot of coffee and some more breakfast sent up. Lenka still had my wooly hat on, the brim pulled down to her eyebrows. When she pulled it off, we could see that the bandages had been replaced by plasters and there was a dark shadow where her hair was just beginning to grow back. Long way to go, of course, and this was the part where she would have to be very careful. She could get in-growing hairs very easily.
"It itches like mad." Lenka was being humorous about it although I had little doubt she'd been seriously shocked by the attack. I went to the bathroom and got a tube of a body lotion and I'd found worked well. My stomach still itches where I caught a bullet in Rome a couple of years back. I tossed it to Lenka with the usual advice about not scratching.
Lenka beamed at me. "Thank you, Angel. We got something very important overnight. The two girls who cut my hair, Naděžda Novotná and Pavla Černíková, have been firmly identified and those identities confirmed. They both come from the north-eastern part of the country, up by the German border. That's where the Radiační Obranná Liga got started and still has a lot of its remaining strength. We have a picture of them doing much the same thing to another girl. This links the shelters with the vice trade.”
"I'd be careful there, Lenka. It shows that the same people might be involved in both, but it falls short of a solid link between the two." Conrad's two-day binge of introspection and self-recrimination had made him a lot more careful about the conclusions he drew.
"There's another couple of things here.” Zofia cut in smoothly despite the obvious strain and exhaustion that was near to swamping her. "I recognize the girl in the picture. She's Jitka Richterová, the daughter of one of Tatka's business associates. She introduced us to the Radiační Obranná Liga shelter. I've never seen her without her hair though. Come to think of it, it's been a year or so since I last saw her."
Just in case we missed the point, Danny pointed to the pictures of Naděžda Novotná and Pavla Černíková, then at the one of Jitka Richterová. "Poor, near-destitute from the north east, rich, idle from the south west. That fits the basic ideology of the Radiační Obranná Liga."
"Coincidence does not equal causality." Conrad really had taken this Charlie-fox to heart. "If I understand the situation right, we take a couple of poor people at random, it’s a good bet they will be north easterners, take a rich, over-privileged person, it’s a good bet they'll come from the south west. The relationship is purely coincidental and the similarity to the Radiační Obranná Liga beliefs the same. Causality is still unproven."
It's an odd thing, but remember I had a feeling right from the start that the geographical division between rich and poor in Czechia had something to do with this situation? Never ignore your instincts. “I wonder if there is a political aspect to this?”
I got some odd looks for saying that. Now the axis of attention had swung away from simple home invastions to a multi-tiered crime, the scope of the investigation had become much wider. I put up a map of income distribution on our computer. Some people have said every piece of information on the Cyberweb is there, somewhere. It's true though. You can find anything you want on the Cyberweb. If you say you are into doing it with burning goats, somebody will ask you what species you prefer. "Conrad, does it seem to you that there is a lot less sadistic violence in the pornographic pictures than there was in the Byrtus home invasion? Look at the pictures carefully. Richterová isn’t even struggling very much. It’s all posed, and the angles are very carefully set up. Frankly I doubt if her hair is even really being cut."
"Is it possible that Novotná and Černíková were simply trying their staged performance out for real?" Notice how tentative Conrad is being? He had a big hole shot through his self-confidence by the way we mishandled this case. That's a good thing in small doses. Quite a few people had remarked that he had become altogether too full of himself. I'll have to make sure it doesn’t go too far. For me, that's a big challenge.
"You mean they played the part in photoshoots and wanted to see what it felt like to really do it? It's certainly possible. If you want, I can get one of our people who are in the business to talk to us about it. For a fee of course. But, remember we use real models, actors and actresses, all of whom are under our protection, and everything you see in our product is staged. Make-up and photographic special effects. We don't, won’t, have anything to do with people getting really hurt. Profit margin is too low and the trouble it causes is too great. So what we know might not be applicable."
Lenka snuffled a bit with a half-suppressed laugh. "Angel, has anybody told you that you are a very scary person?"
"Tell me about it. Anyway, the point about this is that the difference in violence levels suggests to me that there is a significant separation between the people who did the home invasion and the people who did the rest. Another if-you-like, I can get our people to look through the pictures you have and tell you which ones are posed and which ones are genuine. That might help.
"That will give a useful lever in the interviews with them." Conrad had brightened up a little when the conversation had shifted away from how things had gone wrong. By the way, in the last few hours he has also shifted away from 'its everybody else's fault' to 'it's all my fault'. That's an improvement isn't it? "Use the extreme violence to shock them, tell them that they're likely to be blamed for it and rub in what the reactions are likely to be."
"Especially in prison." I watched Danny and Lenka nodding. They are pros, they know the score. "That brings us to another issue. Zofia and Ludvik here. They're open to being charged on several counts."
"Thieving and incest." Danny shook his head. "Kids stealing in the family like this is normally treated as a family matter and we don’t take action unless the pattern of behavior spreads outside the family. Incest is a different matter. It is a criminal offense in the Czech Republic punishable by three years imprisonment for both parties. Prosecuting that is within my discretion. In view of their willing assistance in this case and after a very eloquent plea for mercy from Conrad, I've decided that no further action should be taken. Assuming, of course, there are no further grounds for prosecution."
I could see Zofia and Ludvik relaxing. "So, where are we now?"
"We spent all night going through pictures of missing kids, seeing how many Zofia and Ludvik recognized. The short version is, a lot." Danny sat back slightly. "There is going to be a scandal about this. Anyway, we're having a break and bringing you two up to speed. I've asked the Vice Squad to send some people over to help out and provide copies of what they know."
Conference Room, Grandezza Hotel Luxury Palace.
Realizing how badly he had screwed up had been a bad blow for Conrad so to comfort him, I’d had a serious breakfast sent in for us. Big trolley with coffee, a bottle of Bacardi 151 for me, cherry and venison sausages for Conrad and a selection of side dishes. Oh, and a big bowl of scrambled eggs. When Conrad arrived, he was looking a lot better and his eyes lit up when he saw his sausages. “Angel, that’s great. Thank you.”
I made a little wave of 'don’t sweat it' then went back to looking at our boards. "You know, Conrad, there is a systemic mistake in how we've been doing this. We have always been putting up the possible motives on these boards and using a process of elimination to pick out the most likely. But, suppose there are more than a single motive? That there are two or more sets of motives that coincide and reinforce each other? Or even two parallel but separate crimes?"
Conrad thought about that. "I've run across a few cases like that over the years, but they are rare. I suppose that's why they slipped away from my attention. You think the motives were both robbery and concealing a crime?"
"That's right although there were two separate teams carrying out the functions. The overt crime was a home invasion aimed at stealing the vast store of jewelry that was supposed to be hidden in the house. To Josef Drozd that jewelry was his one big score. Every villain is looking for that and he just couldn't resist the temptation. I'm pretty sure he didn’t know about the security guards. I think the kids were careful enough not to mention them. When he knew Pavel Byrtus would be away, that was his opportunity. He hired his group of thugs to do a home-invasion robbery and told them as little as possible. Especially that a lot of people were going to get killed and by the time they found out, they were too committed to pull out.
"Only, buried within that larger crime was another. Either Josef Drozd or the man behind him knew that evidence of the pornography ring was in that house and he wanted it back right away. The hirelings did the initial invasion and later buried all the bodies while Drozd and his subordinates did the hunt inside for the evidence. That explains the time factor; things weren't done in series, they took place in parallel. They found what they were looking for too, or thought they did. Zofia's computer which they hacked and wiped. They completely missed that secret room.
"He probably convinced his minions that, when threatened, Jana wouldn't hold out on the location of the loot. It wasn't worth the potential price. Which, in itself, is probably right but it was only a small part of the story. The rest of the scenario was why Jana was treated the way she was. He knew that if she didn’t give that evidence up, the police would find it, eventually, and put everything together. What he didn’t realize was that she knew nothing about it." I stopped there; it was dangerously close to what had happened in the Inquisition and Conrad had only just got his good humor back. Only the telephone ringing stopped me from calling room service and ordering another plate of venison sausage for him.
The call was to tell me that one of my guests had arrived. I had been busy on the telephone overnight and this was an early product of that effort. Fortunately, Tom Cisneros had been in Budapest and had taken a rotodyne over. He works for a magazine called the National Spectator. Once it had been a sleazy paparazzi magazine specializing in "candid pictures" of famous people doing squalid things. Then, Tom had stumbled across evidence of a human trafficking ring involving the rich and prominent, exposed them and made a name for himself. From there, he had set off investigating a European group called the Ringcluben. He was innocent enough to think he could get away with that and even more naïve enough to believe being a journalist would protect him from dire consequences. By a miracle he'd gotten away with it right up to the point I blew his foot off. Well, he had been holding Cristi by the throat and slamming her head against the wall. He had been terrified and panicking which Conrad tells me is a partial excuse for his actions. I don’t understand why but then I don’t get terrified or panic. I don’t need excuses for what I do either. Excuses are things invented by people with consciences.
If you've been following my little tales, you know the story after that. After he got out of hospital and was fitted with a prosthetic foot, the National Spectator had reinvented itself as the scourge of human trafficking and child abuse. It had reaped the rewards and become an internationally-respected authority on the matter. None of its investigators were more respected than Thomas R Cisneros. He's more cynical than he used to be but personally, I give him another year to eighteen months tops. I can't decide whether he'll just disappear or whether his mangled body will be found as an example to others.
"Hi Tom. Welcome on board. Coffee? Breakfast?"
I've never known a journalist turn down a free feed. Probably, that's why so many of them get poisoned. Journalist's breakfast, omelet blended with cheddar cheese, fresh chives, sour cream and Polonium 210. Tom looked at our breakfast trolley and noted that we had been eating from it. That reassured him a bit so he helped himself to some sausages and scrambled eggs, then tucked in. When I poured myself some coffee and laced it with Bacardi 151, he looked plaintive, so I made him one.
"What you got for me, Angel?" Tom had finally got it through his thick head that high-level organized crime dislikes the cheap and dirty end of human trafficking and the sex trade as much as he does. We're in both, sure, but top-end only and the low-end people attract police attention and thus endanger our profits. I've said this before, but it bears repeating, our policy of involvement only in high-end activities isn't because we're nice people, we aren't. It's because, in the long term, we make more money and our expenses are a lot less.
"We've stumbled across something that looks a lot like an organized trafficking of runaways and what appears to be an adult entertainment operation." Tom leaned forward, obviously interested. I filled up his coffee mug and gave him the outline of what we had learned to date. Eventually I closed the files and looked at him. "First question, is this linked to the Ringcluben? And second question, is the Ringcluben still in business? They should have been the other way around, shouldn’t they?"
Tom looked at my boys and decided to be non-committal on that. I think he is nervous I'll shoot him again. "The second part is a very good question. Ever since the Zuiderzee Affair, people have been asking whether the Ringcluben survived. We know that the organization in Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland and Austria was thoroughly broken up but that doesn't mean everybody involved was arrested. We have strong reason to believe that some of its members fled abroad. Whether the organization existed in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and so on is something I'm investigating now. What you have shown me suggests that it does.
"That also suggests that the situation here is indeed linked to the Ringcluben. How directly is another matter of course? It may be that fugitive members of the original Ringcluben came here and tried to restart their filthy little games or that the "Eastern European" section already existed and took them in. This Radiační Obranná Liga, could it be a cover for the reformed Ringcluben?"
Conrad thought that one over. "It could be, although the original Radiační Obranná Liga dates back to the early 1950s, after The Big One. Of course, we don’t know how far the Ringcluben dates back. It's not impossible they always were parts of the same group and the Radiation thing was a cover. I'd go further, it is quite plausible that the Ringcluben has been around for a very long time under different names. The British Hellfire Club springs to mind there although the legends about it far exceed reality."
"Don't they always? There was a similar sort of group in China, just before the Second World War. Japanese man would kidnap girls and murder them in front of a paying audience. The Wo Hop To picked him up and gave him some of his own medicine. He didn’t survive of course. I doubt if it was connected to this, just saying this sort of thing is wider-spread than one might think."
"Getting people to realize that is one of our most difficult problems. We get dozens of letters every week telling us that we're wrong, that it can't happen in their neighborhood." Tom looked hopefully at his mug. I filled it up with rum-laced coffee. He drank some and sighed. "You know, Angel, it is worth getting one's foot shot off just to experience your definition of hospitality."
"Pleased to be of service, Tom." We clinked mugs and smiled. "There are none so blind as those who will not see. I can’t complain, we benefit from the same thing. Following that thought, have we any hard evidence that we may have a link here?"
"I'm not sure that it counts as evidence, but I did see this in your file on Jana Byrtus." He produced a scene-of-crime picture of Jana Byrtus still hanging on the wall where she had been killed. "Now, this is a picture the Austrian Police took when they raided the Vienna Ringcluben. They were a little too late to save the victim. A few minutes earlier and they might have been in time. Still, that meant they charged everybody with murder."
I looked at Tom's picture. The similarity between it and the one of Jana Byrtus could easily be too great for a coincidence. "I doubt if she wanted to be saved by then; she just wanted to die. Tom, we have a couple of kids coming here soon. Jana Byrtus was their mother. Don't let them see these pictures, they have no idea how bad this was. Conrad, similarity much?"
Conrad took the two prints and shook his head sadly. "That was a kindly thought, Angel. They should never see these. There's a lot of similarity, yes. Whether it is enough for a court to accept, I don’t know. One thing though. This one was taken in Austria. That's not so far away from here. A shortish drive. Could be possible even to walk it. That adds to the possibility of a link."
"One problem there. We smashed up the original Ringcluben two years ago. It appears that this Radiační Obranná Liga based racket has been going on longer than that. So, if they are linked, they must be parts of the same, not one descended from the other. Could I have another one of those sausages, please?" Conrad handed the plate to him. Tom took one and bit the end off. "Angel, you think there were two separate groups involved in this attack?"
"There must be, the timing doesn’t work any other way."
"Well, if I was in the first group, the home invaders, I'd be distinctly worried about my chances of disappearing."
Well color me shocked. Our Tom is getting smart. "At this point, I'm surprised we didn’t find them in the grave with the other victims."
Digging a grave is hard work and takes time. Another thing we had missed in the original investigation. Conrad could be excused that; he doesn’t get rid of inconvenient bodies for a living. I do, and the fault for not spotting this was down to me. There was a villain once who used to offer various people a couple of hundred bucks to help him dig a grave. Of course, anybody who took the offer always ended up in the grave alongside the original victim. That villain made the mistake of offering me that deal, probably assuming that a teenage girl would be dumb enough to take him up on it. He realized how wrong that was when the first of my bullets went through his forehead. He ended up in said grave thus proving that being a patronizing sexist when talking to a gun-crazed psychopathic female is a bad idea. Tom was right, if the decision to kill the first group hadn't been made from the start, it certainly had now. The problem was, we had no idea of who the members of the second group were.
"Have you got enough for a good story, Tom?" Conrad was asking probably the most important question of all.
Tom looked through his notes and thought carefully before answering. "So far, so good. It's a good cautionary tale of how people can get snared by this world without realizing it. But I'll need a good second part to this, a wrap-up if you like. Exclusive of course. I assume neither of you want your names mentioned?"
"Too right." I grunted that response although it was true on multiple levels. We had some more talk on a semi-social level, including Tom asking after Cristi. I told him she was finishing her stint as a general physician on cruise ships and was returning to university for her final studies and examinations as a forensic pathologist. She'd already had a job offer from a forensic and pathology center in London. Tom seemed relieved at that; I had little doubt his attack on her was something he regretted, again on multiple levels.
Eventually, Tom left and that left Conrad and I to examine what we had learned. The odd thing was, we hadn’t been as wrong as we had feared. There was a robbery component to this crime but focusing on that had left out the wider issues. We'd only seen half the picture. Conrad had been beating himself up about wrongly accusing Zofia and Ludvik. A good night's sleep should have calmed him down. But he hadn't had it. His nightmares had come back in full force. He really needed a day's quiet contemplation to put everything in perspective, but he hadn’t had the chance. He'd have to get it when we got home. Fortunately, the workload on Her Highness's special investigations team was pretty light right now.
We'd just cleared up when Danny and Lenka brought the kids in. All four of them looked exhausted so we got a fresh pot of coffee and some more breakfast sent up. Lenka still had my wooly hat on, the brim pulled down to her eyebrows. When she pulled it off, we could see that the bandages had been replaced by plasters and there was a dark shadow where her hair was just beginning to grow back. Long way to go, of course, and this was the part where she would have to be very careful. She could get in-growing hairs very easily.
"It itches like mad." Lenka was being humorous about it although I had little doubt she'd been seriously shocked by the attack. I went to the bathroom and got a tube of a body lotion and I'd found worked well. My stomach still itches where I caught a bullet in Rome a couple of years back. I tossed it to Lenka with the usual advice about not scratching.
Lenka beamed at me. "Thank you, Angel. We got something very important overnight. The two girls who cut my hair, Naděžda Novotná and Pavla Černíková, have been firmly identified and those identities confirmed. They both come from the north-eastern part of the country, up by the German border. That's where the Radiační Obranná Liga got started and still has a lot of its remaining strength. We have a picture of them doing much the same thing to another girl. This links the shelters with the vice trade.”
"I'd be careful there, Lenka. It shows that the same people might be involved in both, but it falls short of a solid link between the two." Conrad's two-day binge of introspection and self-recrimination had made him a lot more careful about the conclusions he drew.
"There's another couple of things here.” Zofia cut in smoothly despite the obvious strain and exhaustion that was near to swamping her. "I recognize the girl in the picture. She's Jitka Richterová, the daughter of one of Tatka's business associates. She introduced us to the Radiační Obranná Liga shelter. I've never seen her without her hair though. Come to think of it, it's been a year or so since I last saw her."
Just in case we missed the point, Danny pointed to the pictures of Naděžda Novotná and Pavla Černíková, then at the one of Jitka Richterová. "Poor, near-destitute from the north east, rich, idle from the south west. That fits the basic ideology of the Radiační Obranná Liga."
"Coincidence does not equal causality." Conrad really had taken this Charlie-fox to heart. "If I understand the situation right, we take a couple of poor people at random, it’s a good bet they will be north easterners, take a rich, over-privileged person, it’s a good bet they'll come from the south west. The relationship is purely coincidental and the similarity to the Radiační Obranná Liga beliefs the same. Causality is still unproven."
It's an odd thing, but remember I had a feeling right from the start that the geographical division between rich and poor in Czechia had something to do with this situation? Never ignore your instincts. “I wonder if there is a political aspect to this?”
I got some odd looks for saying that. Now the axis of attention had swung away from simple home invastions to a multi-tiered crime, the scope of the investigation had become much wider. I put up a map of income distribution on our computer. Some people have said every piece of information on the Cyberweb is there, somewhere. It's true though. You can find anything you want on the Cyberweb. If you say you are into doing it with burning goats, somebody will ask you what species you prefer. "Conrad, does it seem to you that there is a lot less sadistic violence in the pornographic pictures than there was in the Byrtus home invasion? Look at the pictures carefully. Richterová isn’t even struggling very much. It’s all posed, and the angles are very carefully set up. Frankly I doubt if her hair is even really being cut."
"Is it possible that Novotná and Černíková were simply trying their staged performance out for real?" Notice how tentative Conrad is being? He had a big hole shot through his self-confidence by the way we mishandled this case. That's a good thing in small doses. Quite a few people had remarked that he had become altogether too full of himself. I'll have to make sure it doesn’t go too far. For me, that's a big challenge.
"You mean they played the part in photoshoots and wanted to see what it felt like to really do it? It's certainly possible. If you want, I can get one of our people who are in the business to talk to us about it. For a fee of course. But, remember we use real models, actors and actresses, all of whom are under our protection, and everything you see in our product is staged. Make-up and photographic special effects. We don't, won’t, have anything to do with people getting really hurt. Profit margin is too low and the trouble it causes is too great. So what we know might not be applicable."
Lenka snuffled a bit with a half-suppressed laugh. "Angel, has anybody told you that you are a very scary person?"
"Tell me about it. Anyway, the point about this is that the difference in violence levels suggests to me that there is a significant separation between the people who did the home invasion and the people who did the rest. Another if-you-like, I can get our people to look through the pictures you have and tell you which ones are posed and which ones are genuine. That might help.
"That will give a useful lever in the interviews with them." Conrad had brightened up a little when the conversation had shifted away from how things had gone wrong. By the way, in the last few hours he has also shifted away from 'its everybody else's fault' to 'it's all my fault'. That's an improvement isn't it? "Use the extreme violence to shock them, tell them that they're likely to be blamed for it and rub in what the reactions are likely to be."
"Especially in prison." I watched Danny and Lenka nodding. They are pros, they know the score. "That brings us to another issue. Zofia and Ludvik here. They're open to being charged on several counts."
"Thieving and incest." Danny shook his head. "Kids stealing in the family like this is normally treated as a family matter and we don’t take action unless the pattern of behavior spreads outside the family. Incest is a different matter. It is a criminal offense in the Czech Republic punishable by three years imprisonment for both parties. Prosecuting that is within my discretion. In view of their willing assistance in this case and after a very eloquent plea for mercy from Conrad, I've decided that no further action should be taken. Assuming, of course, there are no further grounds for prosecution."
I could see Zofia and Ludvik relaxing. "So, where are we now?"
"We spent all night going through pictures of missing kids, seeing how many Zofia and Ludvik recognized. The short version is, a lot." Danny sat back slightly. "There is going to be a scandal about this. Anyway, we're having a break and bringing you two up to speed. I've asked the Vice Squad to send some people over to help out and provide copies of what they know."
Re: 2010 - Eye of the Negotiator
Chapter Ten
Operations Center, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
Conrad will always tell you never to underestimate the police. They have a mass of resources not available to anybody outside their ranks, access to an astonishing amount of information and institutions that allow them to sift that information and dig out the nuggets relevant to a particular case. They know far more about you than you think. Every time I talk to a cop, they know exactly who and what I am, it's just they can't prove it. When you talk to a cop, they know who and what you are and they probably can prove it. Poor you.
We are seeing those resources at work now. The Czechia Police know of 68,500 homeless and/or missing youths, the survivors presumably on the streets. Contrary to Josef Drozd’s beliefs, or at least his propaganda line, they are well aware that represents only a proportion of the total. Here’s the thing. They have photographs of every one of those 68,500, sometimes taken by the police themselves, sometimes obtained from families. One step was to go through all those pictures and compare them with the tens of thousands of 'adult entertainment' pictures kept on file. That sounds as if it was hell of a job but it really wasn't. One of the reasons Danny had problems getting funding for his ground-penetrating radars was that the Czechia Police has spent a lot of money on data handling computers and image recognition software. We also used that equipment to compare the pictures Zofia had collected or taken with both existing libraries.
Sounds impressive? Well, think on this. Each one of those entries had attached files for their associates and other acquaintances. Most of those had pictures as well and we could sort through them. And their associates. Soon enough, we start getting the groups linked together. All right, now something you probably don't know. The Seer is seriously worried about how modern information technology is stripping away the cover that us long-lived have enjoyed, in some cases for millennia. So here I am, sitting down and watching how computers and image processing will be used to hunt us down. The Seer's right to be worried. We have the needed technology now. The impressive thing is he foresaw this happening fifty years ago.
It was a strange atmosphere in there at first. There were a dozen or more Vice Squad detectives in the room, most casting some covert looks at Zofia and Ludvik, others at me. Just when they were getting used to having a professional killer in the operations center, we were reinforced by a quartet of people who had been sent over by Le Milieu, the French equivalent of the Mafia or the 14K. They aren't heavies, one is an adult entertainment director, two are performers and one is a makeup and props specialist. They were there to advise the cops on how adult entertainment is staged in our end of the market. Before you ask, by the way, our end of the adult entertainment business is more or less legal. In most countries, the illegal bit is not pixellating genitalia. As the judge at one trial put it. "Proper pixellation prevents persistently punitive pecuniary penalties."
It did take all day but we ended up with a mass of useful data. The Vice Squad picture library was a range of pictures, some being harmless if a bit risqué. Some, a few, were really nasty, 'strong' in the in-trade language. I was very pleased to see that the ones that came from us were down the former end. I couldn’t recognize any of the latter group as coming from us. That was fortunate, if I had, somebody, somewhere would have some very awkward questions to answer. The sort of questions that put them on the 'I wonder what happened to' list. Most of the work was being done by the Vice Squad people, Zofia, Luvik and the Le Milieu visitors were wandering round the room, helping to resolve ambiguities and providing other 'witness' data.
As the matches spewed out of the computers, it was apparent that the worse the product, the more likely it was that homeless runaways were in them. Something else became apparent from Zofia's contributions; the number of performers that came from the Radiační Obranná Liga 'homeless shelter' in the pictures was disproportionately high. As the pictures got stronger, the proportion of professional models and performers got smaller. Once we were at the strongest end, the one that is seriously illegal, professional performers and crew were almost completely absent. Their places in the crew were being taken by runaways and other non-professionals. Once the point was made and we knew what to look for, the lack of professional expertise in those products was clearly evident.
The long process allowed me to make a few telephone calls. One was to Sam Woods who agreed to take Ludvik in as an apprentice as long as his work could make the grade. We'd exchanged some personal and local news, especially about how things in the area were settling down after what Sam called 'the previous bloody unpleasantness'. I'd also called the Free University of Saigon but their business preparatory school places were filled for the next three years. They referred me to the University of Melbourne who agreed to award a place to Zofia once she had passed the required examinations. You $ee, there wa$ mention of a $ignificant donation and a univer$ity alway$ $tand$ by it$ $olvent a$$ociate$. With the kids being split up and their future secured, I got back into the operations center in time to see a major disturbance. Not a violent one, more shock at what the participants had seen.
"There's no doubt about it. That picture isn't faked." The female performer, who used the professional name Igerne Côté, was convinced that the extreme distress of the performer in one picture hadn’t been staged; that the performer was actually dying. The picture had been carefully inspected and her judgment was conceded. The picture in question was of a murder being committed.
"It doesn’t mean the victim did die; it's quite possible the murder process stopped the moment the photograph was taken." Conrad was following his new doctrine scrupulously but even he wasn't convinced by that.
"I recognize the person in the picture." Zofia's voice was shaking. "They were in the shelter for a while. Not one of the homeless, one of the ones helping out with running it."
That was when one of the facial recognition operators did something, we should all have done a long time before. He started re-running the programs to see if the face of the victim was repeated in any of the earlier photographs. Sure enough, it was. Firstly, in some of the softest examples then progressively stronger shots right up to that last one. By the way, I looked at that picture hard and I agreed with Igerne, the performer there was dying and very close to being dead. I've seen a lot of dead people and this was one of them.
By the time we had finished, the pattern was clearly established. The organized crime component of the adult entertainment was all down the softest end and all the pictures were staged. Once it had been explained how the staging had been done, it was fairly obvious although I'll never look at a jug full of mixed half-and-half and honey the same way again. As the pictures went up the strength scale, the use of runaways became steadily more prevalent with the same people returning in progressively stronger roles. We didn’t find another death-shot; personally, I suspect that one had been part of a sequence of pictures and had been released by mistake. Something else Zofia noticed; up at the worst end of the pictures, the majority of the people being victimized were the better-off visitors to the shelter, the ones who had turned up to help run the place.
"That's what would have happened to me." Zofia was looking at one picture through eyes opened wide with horror. "When I went to Drozd. These people must have realized the same things I did and gone to Drozd as well. They all ended up being killed on-camera and the pictures sold."
"You probably saved your life by telling him you had a stock of other pictures that implicated his group. He thought he had to get those before you could be killed as well. Then his people killed the two security guards thinking they were you. When he saw their bodies, he had no idea who they were but was sure they weren't you. At that point he panicked" Conrad left the rest of it out. Note what he had done though; he'd twisted things enough so that both the kids had a reason to believe they hadn't been responsible for the deaths of their parents.
"I think we better have a talk with Josef Drozd." Danny had a grim tone to his voice and I suspect that if Conrad hadn’t been around, it would not have boded well for Drozd.
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
"But I wasn't there." Pavla Černíková had been selected as the weakest link and it was already beginning to show.
"Yes, you were Pavla. You've seen all those forensic procedurals on television? You know what forensics can do. Danny and Lenka managed to stop themselves laughing at that. The problem with those TV shows is that they have taught the audiences to believe that forensics can work miracles. Even better, they had taught said audience to demand 'forensic evidence' for everything. Cops all over the world call it "the CSI Defense." This time it was working for us. Danny produced a brownish hair in an evidence envelope and held it up. "Damning evidence."
"The forensics people found this on the carpet near Jana Byrtus's body. Color is a match" Conrad was speaking the exact, literal truth. The hair color was indeed a very close match to Černíková's. "It is a complete hair, so we have the DNA in the root. It'll take a few days for the analysis to come back but you can guess what it will say."
Conrad was still telling the truth. We had the DNA evidence and it was still off at the lab for a formal test. The reason why it was taking so long was that it had a very low priority. A microscope examination had already shown that the hair had come from a dog. Said it before and I'll say it again. Conrad can tell the truth more deceptively than most people can lie.
"All that's irrelevant. I can identify you doing this, remember?" Lenka cut in, pulling off her wooly hat, to expose her battered scalp. You were laughing remember? Thought it was such fun. Were you laughing at Jana when you hacked her hair off?"
"Nobody cut her hair. . ."
Černíková stopped herself but it was too late. Conrad leaned forward and asked the simple, armor-piercing question. "How could you know whether her hair had been cut if you weren't there?"
She looked around, panicking at the speed with which the net was closing in around her. "Somebody told me, when they got back."
Lenka looked at her with a stony gaze that made me feel a touch jealous. Usually, stony, dead gazes are my thing. "The problem there is that you have already lied to us. Why should we believe that? More importantly, we can prove you have a demonstrated history of torturing women. Remember this?"
She flipped the photograph of Jitka Richterová on to the table. Černíková looked at it as if it had been a live snake, coiled back to strike. "You cut off her hair, just like you hacked off mine. And Jana’s. Demonstrated pattern of behavior. Any court will accept that as evidence.”
Now here is another thing. Conrad won’t lie because his religion doesn’t allow him to. Or, at least his interpretation of his religion doesn’t. I’ll lie without batting an eyelid if it suits me to do so. I’m like the scorpion, it's just my nature. The police can officially tell all the lies they like, as long as they aren’t under oath. Lenka has just done that. A court will not accept a “demonstrated pattern of behavior” without a whole mass of corroborative evidence and even then it's iffy.
Černíková didn’t know that. She was crying and whimpering "I wasn't there, I swear, I heard what happened from people who came back who told me. They never mentioned they'd hacked her hair."
"Then how do you explain this?" Lenka jabbed her finger at the Jitka Richterová picture.
"It’s all staged. We never really hurt her. Anyway, she'd agreed to be the model."
"That doesn't matter; consent from the victim is not a defense against a crime against the person charge." That was right but it was also irrelevant. An hour earlier, Igerne had taken one look at the picture and just said "Staged." Then she had shown us how it had been done. As always, once we'd had that pointed out, it was hard not to see it as a fake.
Conrad leaned forward sympathetically. "How did you get yourself into this mess? I don’t mean the Radiační Obranná Liga shelter, I mean into these pictures?"
At this point Černíková was in the full flow of a breakdown. From that, we got the whole story. Drozd had approached her and told her the shelter was going to fold unless they could raise some money quickly. There was a man who wanted to buy some exclusive, 'artistic' pictures. If she agreed to take part, she'd get a share of the proceeds. She'd been started on very soft, only mildly erotic pictures and only gradually had the strength of the product increased. By the time she had realized how much danger she was in, it was too late to pull out.
"It's called grooming." Lenka glanced around the room. "It's a problem. Several countries in Europe have had situations like this coming up and most of them led to serious scandals. There is a place in England, Rotherhythe? Rotherham? Something like that, where the scandal looks like it could bring down the government."
"Rotherham." I didn’t say that Chris and Humpty had asked me if I could go in there and help them sort a situation like this out. I'll give you one guess what they really meant. It was on my 'things to do' list.
"Thank you." Lenka gestured towards Černíková. "If this one had tried to pull out, she would be the next murder victim. Thank God we caught this before it got worse."
"You don’t know it hasn’t already got worse." I looked at Lenka who shuddered. "We have no idea how many bodies are out there. Or what else is going on. We're lucky Danny had the wisdom to keep on nosing into this case even when we had thought it was all solved. We've dodged as bad a scandal as Rotherham as a result."
Remember those western scenes where the hero is trekking across the desert before he collapses of thirst and exhaustion? Where in his dying delirium he sees an angel bringing him water and shade? Then the face of the angel blurs and turns into the heroine who has risked her life to find and save him? That's exactly the expression on Danny's face. A few simple words had saved his career. For one hideous moment I thought he was going to propose to me.
All right, I'm going to go into exposition right now. You've probably wondered why organized crime participates in some areas of crime and not others. Some we will commit, some we help the police wrap up. Some the police will help us, discretely of course. This case is a part of the reason for that. By operating the way we do, we have unofficial tolerance from the police in minor matters, and our rivals who aren’t so cautious get caught, then convicted of some pretty serious offenses. That gets rid of any competition. We're only interested in money and this is the least expensive way to operate. There are a hundred or more people who'd pay small amounts for one of our pictures for everyone who'd pay more for one of Drozd's. So we minimize costs, maximize revenue. Lots of small income sources are a more stable revenue picture than a handful of large ones. Our activities are to raise money, not commit crimes for the sake of it.
With Danny being happy again, I turned my attention to Černíková. "Let me give you a bit of advice. Soon, Lenka here is going to make you an offer. Bearing in mind what you did to her, a very generous one. You make a full confession and tell us everything you know about his operation and the charges will be dropped down so you do 18 months at most. Everybody else, including Naděžda Novotná, would be going down for at least ten. If they'd been involved in the raid on the Byrtus House, they'd be in for a long drop with an abrupt end. But, one offer only. If one of the others grabs it first, they get the 18 months and you get the drop."
"That's not fair I . . ."
"Half your problem is that you don’t seem to realize life isn't fair. Now are you going to look after yourself or volunteer for a drop?"
We got the complete situation in a full, signed confession that didn’t have any bloodstains on it. The short version is that Josef Drozd was grooming the younger run-aways who ended up in his 'shelter', methodically luring them into his web. Like all of us, he is very manipulative and very persuasive. He's also the kind of psychopath who gives the rest of us a bad name. Once they were thoroughly enmeshed, he started putting them into stronger and stronger products. Then, people started getting hurt in those products. Drozd explained that to his other performers, saying they were rich, idle south-westerners who lived by exploiting the poor, industrious north easterners. They were just getting the punishment they deserved. The run-aways had been groomed into believing anything he said. Jitka Richterová had been just one side of the line, probably the last of her photoshoots to be staged. Lenka had been unlucky enough to be thrown right in at the start of the other side.
The implication of that was clear. Jitka Richterová was almost certainly dead. The only question was, how many other people were? Černíková's confession had also named the people she knew had gone on the Byrtus house raid. Once again, the resources of the police were essential. We handed the list of suspects over to the Czech criminal investigation division and they came back with the files within an hour. They were already known criminals, that should be obvious from the speed of response, and their records indicated a preference for violence. So, would mine of course if everything I had been convicted of in the States hadn't been expunged from the record. With those gone, I'd never been charged with anything other than speeding. I suppose we'd better not go there.
Anyway, we got warrants issued for their arrest in record time and the dragnet started. It was aided by a number of Czech and Russian villains walking beside the suspects and blatantly pointing at them every time they saw a police officer. By late afternoon, we had at least a third of them in custody, two more had turned themselves in at a police station after another pair of villains had explained what was likely to happen to them if they didn't. The rest were presumed to be either dead or running. Of course, the immediate effect of the arrests was a secondary wave of warrants as the first group tried to buy 'the good deal' by ratting their companions out. If that sounds treacherous, it isn’t. All of the targets were well-aware than Drozd and his people would be trying to get rid of witnesses who could lead back to them. It was a matter of who got to them first, the police or the killers. Ratting out to the police was as much a matter of saving their friends as turning them in and getting 'the good deal'. Under those circumstances, even I might forgive a rat. Assuming nobody paid me not to.
That led to something else; once they were in custody, they sang like birds. Confessions were coming in thick and fast. By evening we knew more about the Byrtus massacre and this time we knew that all the pieced fit together in a way they had not done before. The problem for me was that Conrad's self-recriminations were back. He knew all too well that his initial mistakes could easily have resulted in all these people, the really guilty, could have evaded capture and two teenagers wrongly convicted in their place. Conrad needed help and as soon as I could get this business wrapped up, the sooner I could get him some.
Operations Center, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
Conrad will always tell you never to underestimate the police. They have a mass of resources not available to anybody outside their ranks, access to an astonishing amount of information and institutions that allow them to sift that information and dig out the nuggets relevant to a particular case. They know far more about you than you think. Every time I talk to a cop, they know exactly who and what I am, it's just they can't prove it. When you talk to a cop, they know who and what you are and they probably can prove it. Poor you.
We are seeing those resources at work now. The Czechia Police know of 68,500 homeless and/or missing youths, the survivors presumably on the streets. Contrary to Josef Drozd’s beliefs, or at least his propaganda line, they are well aware that represents only a proportion of the total. Here’s the thing. They have photographs of every one of those 68,500, sometimes taken by the police themselves, sometimes obtained from families. One step was to go through all those pictures and compare them with the tens of thousands of 'adult entertainment' pictures kept on file. That sounds as if it was hell of a job but it really wasn't. One of the reasons Danny had problems getting funding for his ground-penetrating radars was that the Czechia Police has spent a lot of money on data handling computers and image recognition software. We also used that equipment to compare the pictures Zofia had collected or taken with both existing libraries.
Sounds impressive? Well, think on this. Each one of those entries had attached files for their associates and other acquaintances. Most of those had pictures as well and we could sort through them. And their associates. Soon enough, we start getting the groups linked together. All right, now something you probably don't know. The Seer is seriously worried about how modern information technology is stripping away the cover that us long-lived have enjoyed, in some cases for millennia. So here I am, sitting down and watching how computers and image processing will be used to hunt us down. The Seer's right to be worried. We have the needed technology now. The impressive thing is he foresaw this happening fifty years ago.
It was a strange atmosphere in there at first. There were a dozen or more Vice Squad detectives in the room, most casting some covert looks at Zofia and Ludvik, others at me. Just when they were getting used to having a professional killer in the operations center, we were reinforced by a quartet of people who had been sent over by Le Milieu, the French equivalent of the Mafia or the 14K. They aren't heavies, one is an adult entertainment director, two are performers and one is a makeup and props specialist. They were there to advise the cops on how adult entertainment is staged in our end of the market. Before you ask, by the way, our end of the adult entertainment business is more or less legal. In most countries, the illegal bit is not pixellating genitalia. As the judge at one trial put it. "Proper pixellation prevents persistently punitive pecuniary penalties."
It did take all day but we ended up with a mass of useful data. The Vice Squad picture library was a range of pictures, some being harmless if a bit risqué. Some, a few, were really nasty, 'strong' in the in-trade language. I was very pleased to see that the ones that came from us were down the former end. I couldn’t recognize any of the latter group as coming from us. That was fortunate, if I had, somebody, somewhere would have some very awkward questions to answer. The sort of questions that put them on the 'I wonder what happened to' list. Most of the work was being done by the Vice Squad people, Zofia, Luvik and the Le Milieu visitors were wandering round the room, helping to resolve ambiguities and providing other 'witness' data.
As the matches spewed out of the computers, it was apparent that the worse the product, the more likely it was that homeless runaways were in them. Something else became apparent from Zofia's contributions; the number of performers that came from the Radiační Obranná Liga 'homeless shelter' in the pictures was disproportionately high. As the pictures got stronger, the proportion of professional models and performers got smaller. Once we were at the strongest end, the one that is seriously illegal, professional performers and crew were almost completely absent. Their places in the crew were being taken by runaways and other non-professionals. Once the point was made and we knew what to look for, the lack of professional expertise in those products was clearly evident.
The long process allowed me to make a few telephone calls. One was to Sam Woods who agreed to take Ludvik in as an apprentice as long as his work could make the grade. We'd exchanged some personal and local news, especially about how things in the area were settling down after what Sam called 'the previous bloody unpleasantness'. I'd also called the Free University of Saigon but their business preparatory school places were filled for the next three years. They referred me to the University of Melbourne who agreed to award a place to Zofia once she had passed the required examinations. You $ee, there wa$ mention of a $ignificant donation and a univer$ity alway$ $tand$ by it$ $olvent a$$ociate$. With the kids being split up and their future secured, I got back into the operations center in time to see a major disturbance. Not a violent one, more shock at what the participants had seen.
"There's no doubt about it. That picture isn't faked." The female performer, who used the professional name Igerne Côté, was convinced that the extreme distress of the performer in one picture hadn’t been staged; that the performer was actually dying. The picture had been carefully inspected and her judgment was conceded. The picture in question was of a murder being committed.
"It doesn’t mean the victim did die; it's quite possible the murder process stopped the moment the photograph was taken." Conrad was following his new doctrine scrupulously but even he wasn't convinced by that.
"I recognize the person in the picture." Zofia's voice was shaking. "They were in the shelter for a while. Not one of the homeless, one of the ones helping out with running it."
That was when one of the facial recognition operators did something, we should all have done a long time before. He started re-running the programs to see if the face of the victim was repeated in any of the earlier photographs. Sure enough, it was. Firstly, in some of the softest examples then progressively stronger shots right up to that last one. By the way, I looked at that picture hard and I agreed with Igerne, the performer there was dying and very close to being dead. I've seen a lot of dead people and this was one of them.
By the time we had finished, the pattern was clearly established. The organized crime component of the adult entertainment was all down the softest end and all the pictures were staged. Once it had been explained how the staging had been done, it was fairly obvious although I'll never look at a jug full of mixed half-and-half and honey the same way again. As the pictures went up the strength scale, the use of runaways became steadily more prevalent with the same people returning in progressively stronger roles. We didn’t find another death-shot; personally, I suspect that one had been part of a sequence of pictures and had been released by mistake. Something else Zofia noticed; up at the worst end of the pictures, the majority of the people being victimized were the better-off visitors to the shelter, the ones who had turned up to help run the place.
"That's what would have happened to me." Zofia was looking at one picture through eyes opened wide with horror. "When I went to Drozd. These people must have realized the same things I did and gone to Drozd as well. They all ended up being killed on-camera and the pictures sold."
"You probably saved your life by telling him you had a stock of other pictures that implicated his group. He thought he had to get those before you could be killed as well. Then his people killed the two security guards thinking they were you. When he saw their bodies, he had no idea who they were but was sure they weren't you. At that point he panicked" Conrad left the rest of it out. Note what he had done though; he'd twisted things enough so that both the kids had a reason to believe they hadn't been responsible for the deaths of their parents.
"I think we better have a talk with Josef Drozd." Danny had a grim tone to his voice and I suspect that if Conrad hadn’t been around, it would not have boded well for Drozd.
Interrogation Room, Main Police Station, Svobody Square, Brno.
"But I wasn't there." Pavla Černíková had been selected as the weakest link and it was already beginning to show.
"Yes, you were Pavla. You've seen all those forensic procedurals on television? You know what forensics can do. Danny and Lenka managed to stop themselves laughing at that. The problem with those TV shows is that they have taught the audiences to believe that forensics can work miracles. Even better, they had taught said audience to demand 'forensic evidence' for everything. Cops all over the world call it "the CSI Defense." This time it was working for us. Danny produced a brownish hair in an evidence envelope and held it up. "Damning evidence."
"The forensics people found this on the carpet near Jana Byrtus's body. Color is a match" Conrad was speaking the exact, literal truth. The hair color was indeed a very close match to Černíková's. "It is a complete hair, so we have the DNA in the root. It'll take a few days for the analysis to come back but you can guess what it will say."
Conrad was still telling the truth. We had the DNA evidence and it was still off at the lab for a formal test. The reason why it was taking so long was that it had a very low priority. A microscope examination had already shown that the hair had come from a dog. Said it before and I'll say it again. Conrad can tell the truth more deceptively than most people can lie.
"All that's irrelevant. I can identify you doing this, remember?" Lenka cut in, pulling off her wooly hat, to expose her battered scalp. You were laughing remember? Thought it was such fun. Were you laughing at Jana when you hacked her hair off?"
"Nobody cut her hair. . ."
Černíková stopped herself but it was too late. Conrad leaned forward and asked the simple, armor-piercing question. "How could you know whether her hair had been cut if you weren't there?"
She looked around, panicking at the speed with which the net was closing in around her. "Somebody told me, when they got back."
Lenka looked at her with a stony gaze that made me feel a touch jealous. Usually, stony, dead gazes are my thing. "The problem there is that you have already lied to us. Why should we believe that? More importantly, we can prove you have a demonstrated history of torturing women. Remember this?"
She flipped the photograph of Jitka Richterová on to the table. Černíková looked at it as if it had been a live snake, coiled back to strike. "You cut off her hair, just like you hacked off mine. And Jana’s. Demonstrated pattern of behavior. Any court will accept that as evidence.”
Now here is another thing. Conrad won’t lie because his religion doesn’t allow him to. Or, at least his interpretation of his religion doesn’t. I’ll lie without batting an eyelid if it suits me to do so. I’m like the scorpion, it's just my nature. The police can officially tell all the lies they like, as long as they aren’t under oath. Lenka has just done that. A court will not accept a “demonstrated pattern of behavior” without a whole mass of corroborative evidence and even then it's iffy.
Černíková didn’t know that. She was crying and whimpering "I wasn't there, I swear, I heard what happened from people who came back who told me. They never mentioned they'd hacked her hair."
"Then how do you explain this?" Lenka jabbed her finger at the Jitka Richterová picture.
"It’s all staged. We never really hurt her. Anyway, she'd agreed to be the model."
"That doesn't matter; consent from the victim is not a defense against a crime against the person charge." That was right but it was also irrelevant. An hour earlier, Igerne had taken one look at the picture and just said "Staged." Then she had shown us how it had been done. As always, once we'd had that pointed out, it was hard not to see it as a fake.
Conrad leaned forward sympathetically. "How did you get yourself into this mess? I don’t mean the Radiační Obranná Liga shelter, I mean into these pictures?"
At this point Černíková was in the full flow of a breakdown. From that, we got the whole story. Drozd had approached her and told her the shelter was going to fold unless they could raise some money quickly. There was a man who wanted to buy some exclusive, 'artistic' pictures. If she agreed to take part, she'd get a share of the proceeds. She'd been started on very soft, only mildly erotic pictures and only gradually had the strength of the product increased. By the time she had realized how much danger she was in, it was too late to pull out.
"It's called grooming." Lenka glanced around the room. "It's a problem. Several countries in Europe have had situations like this coming up and most of them led to serious scandals. There is a place in England, Rotherhythe? Rotherham? Something like that, where the scandal looks like it could bring down the government."
"Rotherham." I didn’t say that Chris and Humpty had asked me if I could go in there and help them sort a situation like this out. I'll give you one guess what they really meant. It was on my 'things to do' list.
"Thank you." Lenka gestured towards Černíková. "If this one had tried to pull out, she would be the next murder victim. Thank God we caught this before it got worse."
"You don’t know it hasn’t already got worse." I looked at Lenka who shuddered. "We have no idea how many bodies are out there. Or what else is going on. We're lucky Danny had the wisdom to keep on nosing into this case even when we had thought it was all solved. We've dodged as bad a scandal as Rotherham as a result."
Remember those western scenes where the hero is trekking across the desert before he collapses of thirst and exhaustion? Where in his dying delirium he sees an angel bringing him water and shade? Then the face of the angel blurs and turns into the heroine who has risked her life to find and save him? That's exactly the expression on Danny's face. A few simple words had saved his career. For one hideous moment I thought he was going to propose to me.
All right, I'm going to go into exposition right now. You've probably wondered why organized crime participates in some areas of crime and not others. Some we will commit, some we help the police wrap up. Some the police will help us, discretely of course. This case is a part of the reason for that. By operating the way we do, we have unofficial tolerance from the police in minor matters, and our rivals who aren’t so cautious get caught, then convicted of some pretty serious offenses. That gets rid of any competition. We're only interested in money and this is the least expensive way to operate. There are a hundred or more people who'd pay small amounts for one of our pictures for everyone who'd pay more for one of Drozd's. So we minimize costs, maximize revenue. Lots of small income sources are a more stable revenue picture than a handful of large ones. Our activities are to raise money, not commit crimes for the sake of it.
With Danny being happy again, I turned my attention to Černíková. "Let me give you a bit of advice. Soon, Lenka here is going to make you an offer. Bearing in mind what you did to her, a very generous one. You make a full confession and tell us everything you know about his operation and the charges will be dropped down so you do 18 months at most. Everybody else, including Naděžda Novotná, would be going down for at least ten. If they'd been involved in the raid on the Byrtus House, they'd be in for a long drop with an abrupt end. But, one offer only. If one of the others grabs it first, they get the 18 months and you get the drop."
"That's not fair I . . ."
"Half your problem is that you don’t seem to realize life isn't fair. Now are you going to look after yourself or volunteer for a drop?"
We got the complete situation in a full, signed confession that didn’t have any bloodstains on it. The short version is that Josef Drozd was grooming the younger run-aways who ended up in his 'shelter', methodically luring them into his web. Like all of us, he is very manipulative and very persuasive. He's also the kind of psychopath who gives the rest of us a bad name. Once they were thoroughly enmeshed, he started putting them into stronger and stronger products. Then, people started getting hurt in those products. Drozd explained that to his other performers, saying they were rich, idle south-westerners who lived by exploiting the poor, industrious north easterners. They were just getting the punishment they deserved. The run-aways had been groomed into believing anything he said. Jitka Richterová had been just one side of the line, probably the last of her photoshoots to be staged. Lenka had been unlucky enough to be thrown right in at the start of the other side.
The implication of that was clear. Jitka Richterová was almost certainly dead. The only question was, how many other people were? Černíková's confession had also named the people she knew had gone on the Byrtus house raid. Once again, the resources of the police were essential. We handed the list of suspects over to the Czech criminal investigation division and they came back with the files within an hour. They were already known criminals, that should be obvious from the speed of response, and their records indicated a preference for violence. So, would mine of course if everything I had been convicted of in the States hadn't been expunged from the record. With those gone, I'd never been charged with anything other than speeding. I suppose we'd better not go there.
Anyway, we got warrants issued for their arrest in record time and the dragnet started. It was aided by a number of Czech and Russian villains walking beside the suspects and blatantly pointing at them every time they saw a police officer. By late afternoon, we had at least a third of them in custody, two more had turned themselves in at a police station after another pair of villains had explained what was likely to happen to them if they didn't. The rest were presumed to be either dead or running. Of course, the immediate effect of the arrests was a secondary wave of warrants as the first group tried to buy 'the good deal' by ratting their companions out. If that sounds treacherous, it isn’t. All of the targets were well-aware than Drozd and his people would be trying to get rid of witnesses who could lead back to them. It was a matter of who got to them first, the police or the killers. Ratting out to the police was as much a matter of saving their friends as turning them in and getting 'the good deal'. Under those circumstances, even I might forgive a rat. Assuming nobody paid me not to.
That led to something else; once they were in custody, they sang like birds. Confessions were coming in thick and fast. By evening we knew more about the Byrtus massacre and this time we knew that all the pieced fit together in a way they had not done before. The problem for me was that Conrad's self-recriminations were back. He knew all too well that his initial mistakes could easily have resulted in all these people, the really guilty, could have evaded capture and two teenagers wrongly convicted in their place. Conrad needed help and as soon as I could get this business wrapped up, the sooner I could get him some.