Gabor began shaking his head violently, but he heard the sound of the slide on a semiautomatic pistol being racked.
“Before you answer, asshole, know this. Ol’ Drago there didn’t want to talk to me, either. And you see what that got him.”
Luca changed his tune quickly. He wasn’t going to risk his life to defend Alexandru fucking Dalca. “Yes, It’s true. He wanted me to make a connection for him. To get him out of the country. I didn’t know why. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.”
“I know why he wanted to run.” The voice behind the flashlight said. “I was why he wanted to run. He’s a smart guy, after all. What I don’t know is what you told him. You tell me right now, or you end up next to old Drago here for eternity, or until a dog comes by, smells your stench, and drags you off.”
Luca thought about the three million dollars his daughter received this afternoon. He could give up Dalca’s secret, but he could not lose out on so much money. He said, “I didn’t help. I refused.”
From his right side, he felt the slap of mud being tossed on top of him. A second later he heard the sound of a spade piercing the pile of loose soil there, and then another load of wet dirt came crashing down. This time it landed on his chest.
He was being buried alive.
“I’ll tell you!” he screamed. “I’ll tell you everything!”
Ten minutes later Midas and Jack pulled Luca out of the hole, put the blindfold back over his eyes, and began leading him back to the minivan. They both noted that Luca Gabor had soiled himself somewhere along the process, and they really did not want to drive him anywhere, but a promise had been made. They’d take him back to Romanian intelligence agents waiting in a parking lot in nearby Sinteşti, and the agents would take him back to Jilava Prison. They would probably be pissed that the clean prisoner they’d handed off an hour earlier was being returned to them covered in mud and shit, but the Americans had gotten the intel they needed, and they would apologize for the trouble and the mess.
Mary Pat had moved heaven and earth to make this happen. The moment Clark had called her after the shoot-out with the Chinese, she’d contacted her counterparts at Romanian intelligence and asked them to look into Dalca immediately. She claimed she had proof he was behind the intelligence leaks in the U.S. that had become the biggest story in the world in the last few weeks, and she needed to know everything about the man in minutes, not hours.
She got a call back in under an hour. Dalca’s name had shown up in a database as having visited a prisoner in Jilava just that day, and Romanian intel officers knew the prisoner well. They told Mary Pat she could send someone over to interview the prisoner at her convenience, perhaps early the following week.
Mary Pat replied she could have someone ready to interview him ten minutes after she hung up the phone.
This was at two a.m.
Romanian intelligence agents, knowing just how fucked-up their world would be if it turned out the attacks in America had anything to do with a former colleague of theirs and they did not make him immediately available to the Americans, went personally to Jilava to cut through any red tape involving the local Bureau of Prisons. Prison officials were rousted out of bed, and at first they tried to send the agents away empty-handed, guards even fingered their guns at one point, but cooler heads prevailed, and promises were made to have Gabor returned before sunup.
No one asked the Americans if they’d had anything to do with the gunfire outside Dalca’s apartment earlier in the evening, or the death of three police officers alongside a half-dozen mysterious Asian men in a nearby park.
The answer to this question was clear, but America’s involvement in this international incident would be covered up by a Romanian government desperate to not publicize the fact one or more of its citizens had been involved with ISIS attacks in the U.S.
After Chavez got what he needed out of Luca Gabor, the shot-up white Renault delivered Gabor back to Romanian intelligence, and they left the body of Dragomir Vasilescu in the shallow grave, one more item for the Romanian government to quickly and quietly forget about for its own good.
63
Dominic and Adara entered the Drake Tower, a thirty-floor co-op on Lake Shore next to the Drake hotel, by means of Caruso waving his creds at uniformed police officers on Lake Shore, which had now been closed off. He showed them again, to another officer, standing at the door to the co-op, and Dom could tell from the face of the lone CPD officer that he was well aware he was standing there, basically alone, guarding a door adjacent to an active terror incident.
The cop wasn’t happy about it, but he was doing his job.
Once inside the building the two Campus operatives took an elevator down to a lower level, and here they followed the plans on Adara’s phone until they found a narrow stairwell. They descended as low as it would go, and this led them to a locked door. Caruso pulled his lock-pick set out of his bag and had the door open in under one minute, then both of them drew their pistols and entered a dark hallway lined with rusty pipes. Dom clicked on his tactical flashlight, and switched to the red filter, because it was harder to detect at a distance, even though it didn’t appear anyone had made it down here from the Drake.
This was no drainage pipe, as it appeared to be on the schematic. It looked and smelled like this concrete hallway had flooded recently and it was filthy and disused, but at the moment it was completely dry.
They made a turn and found a set of concrete steps, at the top of which was another locked door. Adara held the light while Dom knelt and picked the lock.
Adara whispered, “What other skills do you have that I don’t know about?”
Dom said, “You won’t be impressed for much longer. Once Clark gets you back into training, you’ll probably be better at this than me.”
The lock clicked and Dom looked up at her. “But for now, I’m still cool.”
He opened the door carefully and peered in.
When he saw nothing but black, he used his red light again.
A storeroom full of cases of alcohol was as dark as the hallway behind him. He and Adara moved forward to another door, then cracked it open.
Here they were met by blinding light. It was the kitchen of the Coq d’Or, a famous and venerable restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel, directly below the lobby. Adara followed the plans on her phone and realized the elevators were not far from the exit to the bar, but an additional employee-only staircase was just to the right in the hallway below the lobby.
They moved through the dark and empty restaurant, their weapons in front of them, and they could see evidence people had left in a hurry. Drinks on the bar and on the tables still had ice cubes in them, and chairs and barstools were knocked over. There didn’t seem to be any victims down here, but it was clear how chaotic it must have been for the patrons when the volleys of gunfire and explosions kicked off in the lobby, right above their heads.
Dom moved carefully into the downstairs hallway, looked to his left, and saw the exit to the hotel. Police had moved back away from the door, but he could see two teams of CPD SWAT officers crouched behind ballistic shields across the street, and using the partial cover of armored trucks that had been moved there.
Adara came out behind Dom and spun right, her gun in her hands in front of her. She found the employee stairs and entered, and Dom moved behind her. They controlled the door so no one in the stairwell could hear it close, and they listened for movement above. There was a slight shuffling. They knelt together while Dom held his weapon up on the stairs, and whispered into Adara’s ear. “There could be civilians trapped all over the place, so make sure of your targets.”