Amna, surely feeling the intent if not the actual meaning of Ehmet’s words, scooted closer to Yaqub so her red hair trailed along his shoulder. She looked up at him and batted gaudy lashes. “You seem kind,” she whispered in halting English.
I am kind, Yaqub thought, but that did not matter. The girls had already heard too much — and even if they hadn’t, he’d known the girls were as good as dead the moment his brother had first picked up the Serb cutter.
Chapter 27
Quinn shifted in the deep leather seat and opened his eyes. He’d learned from commercial fishing with his father in Alaska, and then later at the United States Air Force Academy, that sleep was a fleeting commodity. It was imperative to grab whatever snippets came his way, even if it meant closing his eyes around a Chinese spy. He still did not trust Song, if that was even her real name, but if she wanted him dead, she’d already had ample opportunity to make that happen.
She’d made a point to remind him that much of the People’s Liberation Army would be hot on their trail now that they were working together, but she apparently still had enough connections to score them a ride to Dubrovnik on a Citation X. The smell of rich leather and new carpet made Quinn think the sleek business jet had just rolled off the assembly line. Song assured him it was privately owned, but the airplane smelled too much like government. It would be a rare private citizen who would loan their twenty-million-dollar aircraft to fugitive spies. More likely the Citation X was an MSS plane, registered to some dummy corporation or innocuous agency, like Winfield Palmer flagged the Challenger he used as an OGA for his OGAs — Other Governmental Aircraft for Other Governmental Agents. The Bombardier Challenger was a fine aircraft, but Quinn was certain Palmer would bristle when he found out the Chinese were jetting around near Mach speeds in the comfort of the world’s fastest business jet.
“You are awake,” Song said, looking over a folded map of the Balkans. “Good. We are almost there.” She wore the thick black glasses again and a pair of white earbuds that led to her phone.
Quinn stretched, arms above his head, feeling the familiar tightness in the scars across his ribs, and the nagging pain from the recent injury to his shoulder. He wondered, as he often did lately when he moved, how long it would be before the broken parts just stayed broken. He’d already noticed a certain lag in healing that hadn’t been there when he was younger and racing motorcycles with his brother.
He covered a yawn, rubbing his eyes at the blinding light that streamed into the cabin. “That was quick,” he said, glancing out the Citation’s round window at the blue-green waters of the Adriatic below.
“The Citation X is fast,” she said, glancing down at her map again. “But I told the pilot to put the spurs to her.”
Quinn stifled a chuckle at the idiom.
“What is it?” Song said, cocking her head. “Did I say something wrong?” She pulled one of the buds from her ear and something that sounded suspiciously like the Zac Brown Band spilled out. A Chinese spy who listened to country music — that explained a lot and raised an entirely new set of questions.
“Not at all,” he said. “Not at all.”
She tapped the phone to pause her song and removed the other earbud, wrapping up the cord and shoving phone and all in the pocket of her vest. “Your friend will pick us up at the airport?”
“That’s the plan,” Quinn said.
“You trust this man?”
“My brother does.”
She took a deep breath, peering over her glasses. Quinn could imagine her scolding a small child about homework.
“And you trust your brother’s taste in friends?” she said.
“I do.” Quinn thought of the Denizens, Bo Quinn’s motorcycle club that operated on the rough edges of legality. “Most of them anyway.”
He’d met Mike “Buzz Saw” Bursaw many times, and though he knew little about the man’s background, Quinn was certain he was completely devoted to Bo — and he could fight, which might come in handy on this go-around. Quinn’s brother had actually introduced Bursaw to the Croatian woman who would later become his wife, when he’d hired her to waitress at the club’s bar outside Dallas. Buzz Saw had traveled home with his new bride and ingratiated himself with his father-in-law enough that the old man had offered to set him up in business in order to keep his daughter and any grandchildren that might come along nearby. Bursaw knew Quinn was a government agent and that he frequently worked outside the lines. None of that seemed to bother him.
Quinn hadn’t told him everything when he’d called that morning, just enough to let him know they were looking for a set of Chinese brothers who would arrive sometime before they did.
Song gazed out the window, obviously mulling this all over. “I hope he is as trustworthy as you believe him to be.”
“I trust him more than I trust the locals,” Quinn said.
“You know what they say,” Song said. “That where Italy is a state with a mafia, Croatia is a mafia with a state.”
What do you expect from a country that invented the necktie? Quinn thought, though he kept it to himself.
Song stuffed the map in a small nylon messenger bag, rummaging around for a few seconds before pulling out Quinn’s Riot, still in its Kydex sheath.
“Here,” she said, sliding it across the oval teak table between them. “You seem to be more comfortable when you have a knife.”
Quinn took the blocky little knife and clipped it to his belt on the left side between three and four o’clock, pulling the tail of the rugby shirt over the green G10 handle. He was pretty sure she gave it to him so it wouldn’t be in her bag when they passed through customs and immigration. Quinn didn’t really care as long as he had his knife back. A body pat down was less likely than a bag search, and if it came to that, a knife on his belt would be the least of his worries.
“I don’t suppose you have an extra pistol in there, do you?” he asked, nodding at her open purse.
“I don’t even have one for myself,” Song said. “But, we are in the black market arms capital of Eastern Europe. I feel certain something will turn up.”
The Citation X banked west on final approach to Čilipi Airport. Dubrovnik’s dazzling umber rooftops came into view — the clay tiles new and bright since the Yugoslav bombardment of the recent war. Quinn looked out the window at the mazes and warrens of the old walled city and took a deep breath. Croatia was thriving, Dubrovnik was beautiful, the food was excellent, and the people were friendly. But Quinn had been to Croatia twice before — both times looking for war criminals, evil men, the thought of whom brought the same flood of adrenaline he felt prior to a fight. Song was right. Some kind of gun would turn up. He just hoped he was at the right end of it when it did.
Chapter 28
Quinn flashed a benign smile at the harried female officer behind the Croatian immigration desk. Thankfully, their arrival coincided with that of a packed Alitalia Airbus and United flight carrying a large television production crew, so he and Song were able to blend in with the crowd. Quinn had trimmed his dark beard back to stubble so he looked slightly different than the photo Song had taken of him in the hospital — not a bad deviation. Things that were too perfect and stories that were too pat were all the more likely to raise suspicion. The immigration officer glanced up at him, incredibly stone-faced for such a young woman who could not yet have been thirty. She perused him a moment, then studied the Australian passport that Song had provided.