The Nameless Ones by John Connolly

Chapter XX

Louis was packing for the Netherlands when his cell phone rang. Angel answered, and the expression on his face showed no warmth as he held up the device.

‘You need to change this number,’ said Angel, ‘unless you’re planning on smuggling in the phone when they eventually lock you up.’

Louis tried scowling at him for effect, but Angel had been rendered immune by decades of exposure.

‘Who are you,’ said Louis, ‘my mother?’

‘If I was your mother, I wouldn’t admit it.’

‘Just give me the fucking phone.’

Angel gave him the fucking phone.

‘I heard about De Jaager and the others,’ said Ross. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You tried,’ said Louis, ‘and for that I’m grateful.’

‘I could have made the call earlier.’

‘I don’t believe it would have changed the outcome. They were marked, and had been for a long time.’

‘What will you do?’ said Ross.

‘Are you asking in your official capacity?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Then you know what I’m going to do,’ said Louis.

‘When do you leave?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be at the bar of the St. Regis in an hour. Meet me there.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t be obtuse. It won’t benefit you.’

Ross hung up.

‘What did he want?’ said Angel, who had returned to filling his own case.

‘To talk. In person.’

‘Is he going to warn you off?’

Louis carefully folded another white shirt.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I think he wants to help.’

Before departing for the St. Regis, Louis contacted Charlie Parker, who had briefly met De Jaager, Paulus, and Anouk in Amsterdam earlier that year.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ said Parker. ‘Because I will.’

‘No, or not yet. The offer is appreciated, though. I just thought you’d want to know.’

‘I’m grateful, and sorry, too.’

‘I know, but this isn’t on you or me.’

‘The Zemuns?’ said Parker.

‘Someone involved with them from way back. The Zemuns, it seems, are yesterday’s news.’

Louis told Parker about the imminent meeting with Ross.

‘It won’t hurt to hear what he has to say,’ said Parker.

‘You think he’s acting out of the goodness of his heart?’

‘Not exactly, unless he’s received a transplant. On the one hand, he did try to warn you.’

‘Yes.’

Parker heard the doubt in Louis’s voice, and couldn’t blame him for it. Louis was right to be cautious about Ross, not least because of Louis’s own past. It wasn’t clear how much Ross knew about it, but he knew enough. Killers and FBI agents made uneasy bedfellows, and Ross probably had the word ‘expediency’ embroidered and framed above his bed.

‘But on the other,’ said Parker, ‘it’s always an exchange with Ross. If he offers assistance, it’s because he sees an advantage that can be gained – and not just a favor he can call in down the line, but a direct benefit.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning it may suit him to have you go after whoever did this.’

‘Well that’s okay,’ said Louis, ‘because it suits me too.’

The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis was quiet, with only a handful of people scattered amid the wood and brass. Ross was seated at the far end, drinking a dirty martini. Louis joined him and ordered the same. They did not exchange pleasantries, but Ross raised his glass, said ‘To De Jaager,’ and Louis did likewise.

‘I met him once,’ said Ross.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It was a long time ago, in Berlin, as we were witnessing the end of the Cold War – or the First Cold War, as I think we’re now obliged to call it.’

Louis had no idea how old Ross was and had never bothered finding out. He’d just assumed that the FBI man had come out of the womb already looking like a late-middle-aged man with hemorrhoids, at which point his parents had disowned him. But if Ross had already been making Europe appear grimmer by his presence at the start of the 1990s, he was probably at least in his late fifties by now.

‘De Jaager fed us some information about a group of hard-core Stasi who didn’t like the way the wind was blowing,’ Ross continued, ‘not that they were unique in that regard, but these particular cold warriors were of a mind to cause trouble. Ordinarily we might just have kept them under surveillance, or let someone else deal with them – maybe their own people, because this was in the days just after the wall had fallen, and we weren’t in a position to go chasing down every lead amid the chaos. And some of us were optimists. We thought the end of communism meant a new beginning.’

‘Were you an optimist?’ said Louis. ‘Because I have to say, that would surprise me.’

‘I might have contracted optimism once, by association,’ said Ross. ‘But I got over it.’

‘I guessed,’ said Louis.

‘I was just a young agent back then, attached to the Berlin embassy as a new legat. I wasn’t privy to all that went down, because it was an Agency operation and I only learned about most of it later. I became involved in the discussions because we were investigating the death of a young American tourist named Annie Houseman in Bautzen, and the Stasi knew more about it than they were prepared to admit, even through the back channels which we were using to communicate with them.

‘Anyway, the story we were hearing was that one of these rogue Stasi guys might have killed Houseman. He got her drunk in a bar, tried to rape her, she fought back, and it all spun out of control. He ended up crushing her head with his car to hide her injuries, although she was already dead by then. It was put down to a hit-and-run, an unfortunate accident amid the anarchy and celebrations, but De Jaager knew better. He got the story from a functionary looking to relocate to Stockholm via The Hague, who was seeking an honest broker for the documents he had to share. The smarter ones knew that it would be a seller’s market at the start, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long, so it paid to stay ahead of the competition.

‘There was no proof of the killing, of course, but De Jaager’s information was never less than cast-iron: this Stasi guy – his name was Buchner – had a lot of blood on his hands, and so did the others in his circle. They’d been around for a long time, and were the go-to crew for advice on torture and execution across the Eastern Bloc, which meant they’d helped to put a lot of our assets in the ground over the years. Letting them fade away to work against us from the shadows started to make less and less sense, particularly when we began to learn more about them.’

Old King Cole stared down at them from his Maxfield Parrish mural above the bar. Everyone in his circle – his courtiers and jesters – seemed to be having a good time, but Louis had never liked the look of him. In his black robe and white collar, he resembled a hanging judge. You could play the buffoon, and make the king laugh, but it wouldn’t stop him from killing you when you ceased to amuse.

‘The operation was farmed out,’ said Ross. ‘The Israelis were probably involved, because they had their own reasons for wanting two of these guys, but I can’t say for sure. They turned it around in three weeks, which was fast: four men dead, and no wreckage. A week after the last of them was dispatched, De Jaager joined us for dinner. His payment was five US visas, no questions asked.

‘I suppose I had scruples in those days, or more of them than I do now. The way it was done bothered me. I wanted Buchner to be arrested and face trial. I still believed in closure, or some semblance of it. De Jaager must have picked up on my unhappiness, because he took me aside as we were leaving. He could have uttered some platitudes about justice being served, but he didn’t. He just said “Sometimes, this is how it must be done. It’s wrong, and it stains the soul, but it has to be, because the other option is so much worse.”’

‘And how do you feel about that now?’ said Louis.

‘Let’s just say I’ve grown more comfortable with the concept as the years have passed.’

‘I can’t say it ever bothered me,’ said Louis.

‘I can believe it. I’ve seen your file.’

‘Don’t believe everything you read.’

‘If even half of what’s in that file is true, you earned the “Reaper” epithet. There are plagues that have killed fewer people.’

‘Did you bring me here to arrest me?’

Ross actually laughed aloud. For Louis, it was akin to watching a dead man dance.

‘If anyone ever arrests you,’ said Ross, ‘it won’t be at my instigation.’

‘Because you might end up taking the stand with me, and not as a witness?’

‘I’ll admit to an aversion to awkward questions where you and your friends are concerned.’

‘Then why are we here?’

‘I know exactly what was done to De Jaager and his people,’ said Ross, ‘and I know the reason, otherwise I wouldn’t have called to warn you about the contact between Armitage and whatever is left of that Serb syndicate in the Netherlands. De Jaager and his family died because, ten years ago, give or take, he conspired in the killing of a Zemun enforcer called Andrej Buha, also known as Timmerman. At the risk of being excessively blunt, I think you killed Buha, either on contract or as a favor to De Jaager.’

‘That must be some file you got,’ said Louis. ‘I’d like to see it someday. I might even recognize some of what’s in it, although it’s unlikely.’

‘Your denial is noted for the record,’ said Ross. ‘But De Jaager and the others died because of what was done to Buha, and now you’re going to find whoever killed them and put them down. In all likelihood, that means you’ll be looking for Spiridon and Radovan Vuksan, unless some of the Zemun old guard have decided to return to Amsterdam and settle scores. But my money is on the Vuksans.

‘This is the thing: There are people in law enforcement – here, and elsewhere – who wouldn’t shed too many tears if some grave misfortune were to befall the Vuksans. They’ve been sowing misery since the Balkan wars, but they’ve always had a particular interest in people trafficking. In the last five years, they’ve expanded into people smuggling, which is a different beast: container trucks, the holds of ships, fast boats across the Mediterranean from North Africa. There’s good money to be made, because the cargo pays upfront. If the cargo drowns, suffocates, or gets caught and put behind wire in a camp in Italy, Greece, or Cyprus, that’s their tough luck. It’s a high-volume, high-yield business, and casualties don’t impact on the bottom line.

‘At the other end of the scale, the Vuksans are moving low volumes with a significantly higher individual yield, and they’re not big on background checks. That form of cargo travels in more comfort, and has to arrive safe and sound, with not even a bruise. The Vuksans charge Iranian Kurds fifty thousand dollars per head to get to the United Kingdom via Serbia and France, and God bless those who make it. We fucked the Kurds over, so I don’t begrudge them a new start.

‘But the Vuksans are also taking money from people who don’t mean anyone any good, not unless you’re in the market for a holy war. Once these men get to Europe – and some of them may be returning after a few years in Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan – they vanish, and we don’t hear about them again until they blow themselves up on a bus or train, drive a truck through a crowded market, or turn a shopping mall into a shooting gallery.

‘And they’re not even the worst. The ones that really frighten us are those who will never get close to a gun or bomb. They’re the organizers, the recruiters, the moneymen. They were Al-Qaeda, then ISIS, and soon they’ll mutate and reappear with a new name but the same ideology. Meanwhile, the Vuksans and those like them are banking one hundred thousand dollars for every piece of delicate terrorist cargo landed safely, and that’s just the starting price. For a high-value target, and therefore high-risk, the Vuksans will ask for, and receive, a quarter of a million, sometimes more.’

‘So why doesn’t someone do something about it?’ said Louis.

‘There’s a rule of law, even down in the dirt.’

‘I know of some dead Stasi who might express a different opinion, if bones could talk.’

‘Suspicions aren’t sufficient cause to add a black tag to a file, and last time I checked, our European allies objected to drone strikes on Paris and London.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Louis, ‘but even if you kill the Vuksans, someone else will take their place.’

‘Possibly,’ said Ross, ‘and indeed the word is that the Vuksans are retiring from the game, although I’m not sure retirement is really in Spiridon Vuksan’s nature.’

‘So why bother with them at all?’

‘As punishment for past crimes, and a warning to those who might be of a mind to follow in their footsteps: If you do this, we will find you, and we will make you pay.’

Louis finished his martini and signaled for another.

‘Are you asking me to do the US government’s dirty work?’ said Louis.

‘I’m not asking you to do anything. Unless I’m misreading the runes, you’re going after the Vuksans one way or another. What I’m saying is that we may be in a position to facilitate your efforts.’

‘With “we” being …?’

‘Concerned citizens.’

‘The worst kind. And how would these concerned citizens facilitate me?’

‘Well, my first thought was that a clean phone might help, so I considered offering you one, but then I realized you probably wouldn’t be very comfortable carrying around a cell phone provided by law enforcement.’

‘You know,’ said Louis, ‘I wouldn’t be very comfortable with that at all.’

‘Great minds. I went with an alternative plan instead.’

‘Another crooked legat?’

Louis had the pleasure of watching the dart hit home. Armitage’s betrayal had left a mess, and everyone in the blast range had suffered damage. Ross wouldn’t have escaped unscathed. He offered Louis a thin smile.

‘I’d like to believe we learn by our mistakes,’ said Ross.

‘I’d like to believe that too,’ said Louis. ‘Obviously I don’t, but I’d like to.’

‘The Bureau has limited jurisdiction overseas,’ Ross continued, ‘so given the delicacy of what is being proposed, I’ve supplied some reading material, and alerted an interested party about your travel plans.’

He stood to leave. A copy of the New York Times lay on the bar between them. Ross tapped it, and threw down cash to cover the tab.

‘You ought to take a look at today’s paper,’ he said. ‘You might find it informative. Travel safely.’

Louis watched Ross go, but did not immediately reach for the Times. Instead, he sat and thought. In the years since he had come to know Parker, Louis’s life had changed in ways he could never have imagined. Many of these developments were positive, or at least not actively negative, but coming into contact with SAC Edgar Ross of the FBI was not among the latter. Louis did not doubt that a record of his activities existed somewhere in Federal Plaza, although he suspected that much of it was for Ross’s personal amusement only – or that was his hope. Whatever the truth of the matter, Ross’s knowledge of Louis was a threat, and hung like a sword over his head. Eventually, something might have to be done about it.

There was also the problem of Armitage and her legacy. If she had been in contact with the Vuksans, and was responsible for setting them on De Jaager, then a trail existed, one the Bureau would prefer to see erased. Ross had just handed Louis a broom and told him to get sweeping.

But if Armitage was the source of the Vuksans’ information, what else had she told them? Ross was assuming that Armitage had, in the course of her duties, come across material confirming De Jaager’s instigation of the killing of Andrej Buha, but what if this was not all she had discovered? According to Ross, Armitage had made contact with the Vuksans shortly after Louis and Angel left Amsterdam. The possibility existed that it was not only De Jaager she had fed to them but also Louis.

So Louis drank, and mused. When he finally left the St. Regis, he did so with a copy of the New York Times under his arm.