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‘Naturally. I mean, how could it be? So what can I do for you this time?’
‘We have a burner phone here. Totally anonymous. It was left to us by the person we’re tracking, and any information you could glean from it would be greatly appreciated. And before you say it, I don’t expect miracles.’
‘Very wise. Still, I guess I can try. Is the phone switched on now?’
Korso turned to Natasha with a raised eyebrow. She pulled Cain’s burner from her pocket and pressed a key. The display lit up. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said.
‘Give me the number and I’ll take a look-see. If there’s nothing there, consider this a freebie. Anything else will cost you.’
‘Understood.’ Korso recited the number from memory, then just concentrated on the road while Dog worked.
Less than a minute later, Dog said, ‘Nothing. That phone’s cleaner than a nun’s browser history. I’m looking at the call log now, and all I can see is a single incoming call and two incoming texts. All completely anonymous and untraceable. And I do mean John Doe anonymous, with cut-outs and everything. If your guy was the one making those calls, he’s clearly no dummy.’
‘That much we already know. Thanks for checking, though.’
‘No sweat.’
‘Well, it was worth a try,’ Korso said. He pressed the button to lower the window, and threw the phone out.
‘Was that wise?’ Natasha said. ‘That phone was our only means of contact with Cain.’
‘I have trust issues with people who continually try to kill me. Also, he might be able to track us through it. It’s not worth the risk.’
He drove in silence for the next few minutes, figuring out the best approach from which to come at the problem. He figured they had enough time for just one more throw of the dice. If he got it wrong, it was game over and he’d be on the run for the rest of his natural life. For however long that might be. Still, he knew there was always an answer to any given problem. He just had to find it.
Another phone began ringing, pulling him from his thoughts. Natasha’s this time.
She grabbed it, checked the screen. ‘Care to guess who?’
‘Not really. Just let it ring.’
She ignored him and took the call. ‘Three, four, seven, one. I am here… No, it went badly. We still do not have it.’ She moved the phone away from her ear as Sardoca yelled garbled obscenities. Once he’d calmed down, she brought the phone to her ear and said in a calm, deadly voice, ‘You would do well not to take that tone with me. I am not one of your lackeys.’ There was a pause as she listened to his no doubt apologetic reply. ‘Very well.’
She hung up and went into her menu.
‘Not a happy camper, I take it,’ Korso said.
‘Did you expect him to be? I’m to call him back via Skype. A video call again.’
‘Like it isn’t bad enough just listening to his voice.’
Natasha said nothing as she pressed more buttons. Korso just drove.
Shortly, she raised the phone so it was in front of her face, holding it in landscape mode. ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘How’s the audio? Can you hear me?’
‘I hear you just fine,’ Sardoca said. ‘Move the phone around, Natasha. Let me see everything.’
Out the corner of his eye, Korso saw Natasha panning the phone slowly around the car interior in a semi-circle, then back again.
‘Good,’ Sardoca said. ‘Now angle it so you’re both in the frame.’
‘Interesting choice of words,’ Korso said.
Natasha placed the phone against her door’s armrest, then sat back in her seat. Korso took a brief glance at the phone, and saw Sardoca from the waist up, sitting at what looked like a breakfast bar. He wore a sweatshirt with the arms cut off, and a blue baseball cap. He held a bright green smoothie in his right hand.
‘So what went wrong, Korso?’
‘I’m driving,’ Korso said. ‘Natasha can tell it far better than I can.’
‘I want you to tell me.’
Korso smiled. ‘This may come as news to you, Sardoca, but I don’t care what you want. Natasha, be so kind as to give your associate a recap of events so far.’
Natasha turned to the screen and started talking, giving Sardoca a concise account of their long hour in Bilchner. Mostly her side of events, of course. She finished with the explosion in the drugstore, mentioning how Korso had warned her away from entering the building moments before it went off.
‘Well, I wouldn’t read too much into that,’ Sardoca said. ‘With you gone, Korso would know the instant I found out I’d feed him to the sharks, so it’s far better to keep you alive in the long run. He always looks out for his own welfare first. Am I right?’
‘Aren’t you always?’ Korso said.
‘So let me see if I’ve got this straight now. With time fast running out, you’re telling me you still don’t have a clue who this Cain might be, or where the shipment is, and that our only lead has now flown the coop to god only knows where. Have I missed anything out?’
‘That’s actually a pretty faultless summary,’ Korso said. He was almost enjoying this. It was always good to see Sardoca sweat.
Sardoca gave a weary sigh. ‘Except I know you, Korso. And you’ve never been the type to simply give up on an assignment. Which means you’ve already got something else in mind.’
‘Of course I do. It’s not rocket science. If one trail goes cold, you simply come at the problem from a different angle. So that’s what we’ll do.’
‘And what angle is that?’
He noticed Natasha was also looking at him now. ‘We tried the direct approach, which was to track down the shipment itself, which in turn led us to those responsible for the heist. That looked promising for a while, but now Cain’s decided to take himself off the grid that trail’s dead, as are most of the men behind it all. So instead we’ll go after the aircraft itself. Find the plane, find the shipment. In theory, of course.’
‘Theories? I don’t have time for theories, Korso. Which means you don’t either.’
‘Well, if you hadn’t wasted ten days of your original deadline we’d have exhausted all manner of possibilities by this point, crossing each one off as we went along. But we no longer have that luxury, do we? So unless you’ve got a sure-fire lead you’ve been keeping from us, this is the best you’re going to get.’
‘He has a point,’ Natasha said. ‘We’re fast running out of options here.’
Sardoca said nothing, but sipped at his smoothie. Korso drove, more than comfortable with the silence. After a moment, Sardoca said, ‘Okay, tell me what you need.’
Finally, something constructive. ‘Tell him, Natasha,’ Korso said.
‘Contact our man in the SAA,’ she said. ‘It will sound better coming from you. Instruct him to email PDFs of their findings so far, both official and unofficial, in order that we can discount those areas already investigated. The same goes for their counterparts in Guyana. Do we have someone in that organisation able to supply us with that kind of data?’
‘The lead investigator, as it happens.’ That smug smile of his filled the screen. ‘Since a week ago. The moment he heard the figure we were offering him, the guy was like a dog in heat. I’ll have them both email the relevant documents to you within the next thirty minutes.’
‘Good,’ Natasha said.
‘Anything else?’
‘Not right now,’ Korso said. ‘Once I’ve had a good look at their progress, we can start formulating a definite plan of action. We may need further intel, but I’ll let you know when we do. Or Natasha will.’
‘Fine. Now that we’re getting down to the wire, I’ll also be wanting more frequent progress reports from you two. And Natasha?’
‘Yes?’
‘Never let your guard down with this guy. I mean it. Not for a second.’
Sardoca’s face shrank to nothing as he ended the call.
Korso gave Natasha a sideways glance. ‘If only he knew.’
Forty
21 hours, 35 minutes and counting…
Forty-five minutes later, Natasha flashed her Platinum Visa at the card reader next to the cash till. It beeped back and a green tick flashed up on the display. The large, bespectacled cashier gave Natasha a wide smile as she handed her a receipt for their food.
‘Thanks for visiting Harlequin’s,’ she said. ‘You two have yourselves a great evening now. And don’t forget to check out the bestsellers section downstairs before you go. We got some new arrivals just in today.’
‘We will,’ Natasha said, smiling back. ‘Thank you.’
With his laptop under his arm, Korso picked up the full tray and carried it to one of the empty tables by the window. At 17:25 on a weeknight, the cafeteria had plenty to choose from. They sat facing each other. Natasha took her coffee and bagels from the tray, leaving him with his tea, mineral water and toasted ham and cheese sandwich.
They’d entered the city of Durango ten minutes earlier. Korso had been driving through the downtown area, looking for a quiet place to lay low and make plans, when he saw the large bookstore. Nestled between a franchise hardware store and a sports bar, it was an unassuming, two-storey building with an eye-catching black and white logo out front. It also boasted its own cafeteria on the second floor. Since he always gravitated toward the literary, the place immediately appealed to him. After parking the vehicle, Natasha had picked up some fresh bandages and other supplies from a nearby drugstore, after which they made their way to the bookshop. Upon entering, Korso had nodded with appreciation at the first floor’s eclectic layout of displays, as handmade signs with too many exclamation marks promised unbelievable delights behind every book cover. Korso got a kick out of the writer’s obvious enthusiasm. And also the irreverence. Under different circumstances, he could have spent a whole afternoon in there, just browsing.
Natasha sipped at her coffee while Korso set his laptop on the table. Muted conversation came from the few other patrons dotted around the cafeteria. Some were quietly reading the paperbacks they’d just purchased, occasionally sipping their drinks or munching on their snacks. An elderly man at a nearby table was happily paging through a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. The numerous bookshelves taking up the background gave the place the feel of a library reading room.
‘Time to see if Sardoca’s kept his word,’ he said.
Natasha pulled her phone from her pocket and swiped the screen a couple of times. After a few seconds, she said, ‘As promised. I’ll forward it to you now… There, done.’
‘Thanks.’ Korso opened his laptop, logged on to the store’s free wifi service and accessed his email account. He had three new messages in his inbox. The first was from an existing client, the second from a potential one, the third from Natasha. He opened it and checked the address of the original sender. It was from a standard Gmail account. The username was sarfra followed by what looked like ten random numbers, but probably wasn’t. There was no text in the email, just two PDF attachments, labelled Ukr1 and Guy1.
‘This Gmail address of Sardoca’s,’ Korso said. ‘Is that the account he usually uses to communicate with you?’
She bit into a bagel. ‘And everyone else he deals with, for all I know. Why? Are you planning to put it on a spam mailing list?’
‘I’m not that small-minded.’
Putting down the bagel, Natasha replaced the lid on her coffee cup, reached for her shopping bag and got to her feet. ‘In the meantime,’ she said, ‘I will be in the restroom replacing these bandages.’
Korso nodded distractedly as he double clicked on the first attachment. It opened up to reveal a sixty-seven-page document. There was no contents listing, since the final official accident report hadn’t yet been filed. What he was reading was clearly still a work in progress, consisting mostly of preliminary reports and third-party testimonies submitted by the individual FAA investigators. Therefore, no title page or synopsis at the beginning, and definitely no ‘analysis and conclusions’ section at the end. But that was fine. He was less interested in their theories or hypotheses than he was in their specific areas of research. Fortunately, this wasn’t like some assignments when he’d had to wade through pages and pages of ancient photocopies, with much of his time spent deciphering mostly unintelligible handwriting. These days everything was keyed straight onto an iPad using the industry standard Times New Roman or Helvetica, thus making his job that much easier.
He slowly scrolled down the document, speed reading through all the technical wording to make sure he didn’t skip anything vital. Since it was all written in their native Ukrainian, he was sure he had missed things. Korso was fluent in Russian, so he could understand most of it since they both used a similar form of the Cyrillic alphabet. But there were numerous differences in the languages. Whole paragraphs flew by where he barely understood a single word. Most obstacles of that type could be solved by using the surrounding text as context for the problematic passages, enabling him to make some sense of the whole. But it was a hard slog.
Part of his subconscious noticed Natasha return to the table at some point, but his attention remained squarely focused on the screen in front of him.
As he neared the end of the file, he finally reached the appendices. This was more like it. Among other things, these sections listed the various locations checked by the investigators, and the results of their findings there. All were still at the bullet-point stage. Later, a technical writer would integrate all these disparate elements into a single cohesive report that would make sense to the average layman, whereupon it would then be released to the media. But for now, bullet-points were just fine.
He looked through it all carefully, methodically. He figured the SAA must have a fairly substantial expense budget. Assuming this appendix was up to date, in the last six weeks their investigators had travelled to a total of seventeen countries in order to follow up leads, not including the Ukraine itself. Half of those trips were to smaller islands in the Caribbean, such as Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Grenada, as well as Jamaica and Puerto Rico. The rest were devoted to Guyana and its closest neighbours, Suriname, French Guiana, Venezuela, and a few others.
He looked through it all, then sat back in his chair and stared out the window, digesting what he’d read, while adding his own conclusions to the mix. He caught sight again of the elderly guy reading Edgar Allan Poe, and as he did so, the germ of an idea began to form in the back of his mind.
Coming back to the present, he noticed it was almost twilight outside. Checking the clock on his laptop, he saw almost an hour had passed in the blink of an eye. He didn’t have many of those left.
Natasha looked up from her phone. She was wearing a completely different shirt than before, with only a small bulge on her upper left arm to indicate that she still wore a bandage under it.
‘Your tea is cold,’ she said.
‘How would you know?’
‘I tried some. Disgusting.’
Korso picked up his cup and drank down half of the cool liquid in one go. ‘Nothing wrong with cold tea. Where did that shirt come from?’
‘I went out and bought it thirty minutes ago. You didn’t notice me leaving.’
Korso reached into the paper bag for his sandwich and took a bite. Although cold, it still tasted good. ‘So what else happened while I was away?’
‘The co-pilot called me a few minutes ago to say they’ll be landing shortly. I told him once they’re on the ground they should refuel the plane and just wait for us, and that we’ll give them our new destination once we arrive. Assuming we have one by then.’
‘I remain optimistic. Anything else?’
‘I’ve also been looking over this Guyana document,’ she said, waving her phone. ‘I tried the other one, but soon gave up. My Russian is only adequate.’
‘It’s Ukrainian, and it was tough going for me too, though informative. But Guyana’s an ex-British colony, so I’m assuming their reports are in English, right? I haven’t looked at them yet.’
‘They are, but you may not want to bother. The GAA are clearly not as thorough as their Ukrainian counterparts. The PDF document contains only eighteen pages.’
‘They’re probably just understaffed,’ Korso said as he leaned forward and opened the document himself. ‘Guyana’s still what they term a developing country, although that could change anytime. I read that they struck oil in the Atlantic several years back.’
‘How fortunate for them.’
‘Only for those in power. The country only benefits if that wealth trickles down to the populace, which seems doubtful with all the corruption over there.’
She smirked at him. ‘Cynic.’
He shrugged. ‘We both know how the world works.’
Using the touchpad, he slowly scrolled down the document. Natasha was right. There wasn’t much to it. As far as he could see, they only had three people assigned to the case, and all their investigative work was based in Guyana itself. He speed read through it all fairly rapidly, and saw nothing of any real consequence. Although that was kind of interesting in itself. The investigators had searched the countryside for wreckage or tracks, as well as interviewed farmers or anybody who might have seen or heard a low-flying plane on the specified date, with no results. But he also knew that Guyana was one of the more sparsely populated countries in South America, with rainforests covering much of its land mass. So on the face of it, those results didn’t really mean much.
Except, that little germ of an idea was now starting to grow in his mind. Time to see if there was any weight to it. Exiting the document, Korso opened his browser and went to Google and typed three words into the search field.
The results that came up were less than satisfactory. Each of the top hits contained two of those words, but never all three. He went to Yahoo instead, tried the same thing again, and got essentially the same results.
So he tried one of the less well-known search engines instead. That had sometimes worked for him in the past, giving him results he hadn’t been able to find elsewhere.
This time, he got a hit on the third page of results. Some user on Reddit had posted some photos, and even given the latitude and longitude coordinates. He read the user’s comments with steadily mounting enthusiasm. He’d always assumed these kinds of places were confined to just the wealthier countries. Which just went to show there were still things out there that could surprise him. Korso wondered if Cain had seen this very same site, and gotten the very same idea. It was an intriguing notion.
