The Nameless Ones by John Connolly
Chapter LVII
Most and Louis disposed of the Phantom surveillance drone by dousing it in gasoline and setting it alight in a dumpster. Most then drove Louis to a guesthouse on the outskirts of Lidice, just a short distance northwest of Václav Havel Airport. In June 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, the Germans had razed Lidice and sown the ground with salt. They had also executed every male over the age of fifteen and sent the women and children to Chelmno to be gassed, apart from a handful adjudged physically acceptable enough to be Aryanized. The current village overlooked the site of the original settlement. A line of trees concealed it from the view of those staying at the guesthouse.
No one at the desk asked Louis for identification or payment. An elderly woman showed him to a tiny, spotlessly clean room, and left without offering a word. The earliest direct flight from Prague to Vienna left at 8:15 a.m., and Most had decided that Louis should not spend the intervening hours waiting in an airport lounge. Most thought it unlikely that any connection would be made between the explosion at the casino and the departing American, but in the event of such a misfortune befalling them, it would be best if Louis were somewhere other than a terminal building filled with cameras and armed police.
Louis did not sleep, or even remove his shoes, although in deference to his hosts he placed a towel at the foot of the bed so as not to mark the comforter. The TV in the room did not have a cable or satellite connection and was limited to terrestrial Czech channels. He turned on his iPad and tried using the guesthouse’s internet to check local news reports, but most were in Czech and none mentioned anything about an explosion at a casino. After an hour he heard a knock at his door, and Most’s voice called his name. Louis admitted the big man, who just about managed to fit into the room’s single chair. Most had arranged for the motorcycle to be collected by one of his nephews, and all traces of their presence at the factory to be erased, right down to the tire tracks of the BMW.
‘Well, they have no leads yet, so we weren’t seen,’ said Most. ‘Bilbija’s definitely dead, but it’ll take them a while to gather all the bits of him. Two members of the casino’s staff were injured in the blast, one seriously, but he’ll pull through. The police know it was a drone attack because the guard at the gate caught a glimpse as it passed over. They’ll be looking for fragments in the hope of finding a serial number, but that’s long gone. The explosive was tagged, but it was the only C4 I held from that particular batch, and they won’t be able to trace it back to me. I was saving it for a special occasion.’
C4 usually contained a chemical marker to give it an odor and enable its source to be established. By a strange coincidence, the C4 used to kill Luca Bilbija would subsequently be identified as part of the same batch used to assassinate Nikola Musulin in Belgrade. Such were the vagaries of fortune.
‘What about your contact at the casino?’ said Louis.
‘She’s a smart girl. She destroyed the SIM card and the phone I supplied. She still has her own phone, and she used it to send a couple of emojis to her boyfriend while she was texting me, just in case the police or the Novákovi start asking why she was seen using it. The kids in there all have phones stuck to their hands anyway, so she won’t have been the only one. She’ll be okay.’
‘And you?’
Most grinned.
‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘But you won’t be when you see my bill.’
After some reflection, Louis decided not to fly to Vienna but take another train instead. The high-speed Railjet would get him and his baggage, both legal and illegal, from Prague to Vienna in just over four hours, enabling him to continue holding on to the unused Rohrbaugh pistol along with a Glock sourced for him by Most. While he could have picked up replacement weapons in Vienna, it would have involved reaching out to second-tier contacts, ones with whom he was not personally acquainted. Every such transaction involved a degree of unmasking, and it was unwise to expose himself more than was necessary. Louis booked a first-class ticket for the 8:44 a.m. departure, and Most escorted him into the station at 8:30, but not before first checking the concourse for any signs of unusual security activity, the Czech having an eye for such matters. They parted with a handshake and Louis took his seat on the train, his bags now heavier by the weight of the Glock and fifty additional rounds of ammunition.
Three to go, he thought.