THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

Chapter 10: THE BLIND SPOT AT THE TUNNEL

The rain had been falling for six hours, and it had not once changed its mind.

It came down fine and straight and steady, the kind that does not fall so much as hang, and by 4:45 on Thursday morning it had soaked through the shoulders of Zale's jacket and found the skin underneath. He stopped noticing at about three. The cold had stopped being weather and become a place he lived.

He crouched behind the east wall of a stone shed that had once sold coffee and cigarettes to people who drove this road for pleasure. The roof had come in years ago. What remained was three walls, a doorframe with no door, and a counter swollen with damp, and he knelt in the black corner where the counter met the stone with his back against the cold wall and his boots in an inch of standing water. Thirty feet in front of him, the pump.

One pump. That was the whole station. A single old Italian fuel dispenser, painted a red that had gone brown, stood under a rusted tin canopy on two skinny posts. A bulb in a wire cage hung from the canopy's underside and threw a weak yellow glow over the concrete apron, and the rain crossed that glow in long silver threads. Past the edge of the light, the apron gave way to asphalt, and the asphalt gleamed like wet slate. The road ran straight in both directions and then did not, because the fog took it.

He had arrived at ten past two. Seven hours ago he had been on the hot pontoon, laughing at a rope. Now his breath came out in slow gray ribbons and vanished before it left the shelter of the wall.

Four forty-six.

The geometry of the place had settled into him in the first hour, and he went over it again because there was nothing else to do. To the east, the road ran two hundred meters to the mouth of the tunnel, a black half-circle cut into the mountain, the lip of it furred with moss and dripping. Nothing in it. No light, no sound, only a darkness so total it seemed to lean out toward the road. To the west, the road bent along the cliff and disappeared into the fog toward Kotor. On the seaward side of the pump there was no wall at all, only a low concrete curb and a rusted guardrail, and past the guardrail, nothing. A drop of thirty meters, perhaps more. The sea breathed at the bottom of it. He could hear it, a long, slow, sucking sound against the rocks, in and out, like a sleeper.

On the landward side stood the cliff, black and wet and sheer, sweating water down its face in ten thousand little threads. The rain on the canopy made a continuous hollow drumming, a dull steel roll with the occasional sharp tick of a large drop landing off-rhythm. Somewhere under it a loose sheet of tin knocked against its post with each gust.

He had stopped hearing it by now. That was the trick. A man listening to everything heard nothing. A man who had let the constant noise fall away could hear the one thing that did not belong.

His knees ached. Not sharply. A deep, dull, grinding ache in the joints, the kind that spread slowly outward until the whole of both legs seemed to be made of wet sand. He had been in the same crouch for two hours and forty minutes, and he did not shift. A shifting man scuffed. A scuffing man was heard, and a man who turned around at the sound of a moved ashtray would certainly turn around at the sound of a boot.

He breathed.

In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The cold air got caught in his chest every time, a heavy damp thing that sat behind the sternum and would not quite come out again, and he forced it through his nose in a thin steady stream. His pulse knocked slow and level against his collarbone. Fifty. He checked it by the pressure of two fingers against his own wrist, and it held at fifty, and he let the fingers fall back.

The dive watch on his left wrist glowed green. 4:51.

In his right coat pocket, the brass watch ticked against his hip. He could feel it, not hear it, a small steady knock through the lining, like something alive that was waiting with him. He had wound it at midnight. He did not touch it now.

*Nikad ne spava dvaput na istom mjestu.*

A man like that did not trust the road. He would not trust a pump at the end of a lonely stretch, either, which meant he would send someone ahead. A scout, a spare car, a drone. Zale had spent a night before going over what that meant, and it was why the shed. Not the high ground. Not the rocks above the road, which any competent man would clear first. A rotting hut at ground level, eleven meters from the pump, with a wall of stone and a collapsed roof and a pile of wet junk in one corner that no one could look at without wanting to look away. The ugliest, least useful hiding place on the whole road.

He had checked the road twice for the scout. The first time at three. The second time at four, on foot, the long way around through the scrub above the curve, and he had found nothing. No heat, no tire marks, no cigarette ends, no sign of a human being. That worried him more than a scout would have.

4:56.

A sound crept in under the rain.

He almost missed it. It was so low that it came through the soles of his boots before it came through the air, a faint, deep, rolling tremor in the concrete, like a distant train passing under a distant town. His eyes did not move. His breath did not change. Only the pulse in his wrist kicked, once, and settled again.

The tremor swelled. Now it was a sound, a long heavy diesel growl, enormous and unhurried, rolling and echoing off the rock. The cliff took it and handed it down the road in pieces. Somewhere out in the fog, a very large engine was coming up through its gears, and every gear change thudded against the mountain like a fist on a door.

Two engines. He split them out. A bigger one, throaty and slow, laboring. A smaller one in front of it, smooth, expensive, a purr under the roar.

The sea went on breathing. The rain went on drumming. Under the canopy, the caged bulb flickered, steadied, and flickered again.

He did not lift his head. Only his eyes moved, up and to the left, where the road came out of the fog.

The fog changed color.

It happened slowly, from the bottom up. First a faint whiteness, thin as milk in water, creeping along the base of the mist. Then a smear of yellow. Then two long pale blades slid out of the gray, sweeping low over the asphalt, and the fog around them lit up from the inside until the whole bend of the road glowed like the inside of a lamp.

Headlights. Four of them. Two close together, low and bright and cold, like the eyes of a big cat. Two higher up and wider apart, throwing a duller yellow and a heavier shadow.

He pressed himself back against the stone. The cold of the wall came through his jacket into his spine. He folded his hands one over the other and made them still.

The smaller lights came first. They resolved out of the murk and became a car, tall and boxy and black, the rain bouncing off its roof in a fine silver haze. It took the last curve at a controlled speed and slowed as it reached the apron, the tires hissing on the wet. Behind it, enormous, a wall of dark metal rose out of the fog with its lights on high beam, a Merrow Freight tractor-trailer with the name in tall white letters down the flank, forty tons of steel throwing a shadow forward across the road that swallowed the lead car whole.

Zale did not breathe. The beams swept the cliff face, the guardrail, the canopy, the shed. The light crossed the wall above his head and slid on. A wash of white lit the rain around him, bright as day for the length of one heartbeat, and he did not blink.

The Mercedes came to the pump and stopped in a long hard slide, brakes shrieking. The truck behind it stood on its air brakes with a roar and a sigh, and the whole of the apron lit up bone white from two directions at once. The light poured over the empty concrete. Over the pump. Over the empty counter and the rusted shed and the standing water and the rain.

Nothing on the apron moved.

The engines idled, the heavy one rattling in its chest, the small one a low smooth hum. The rain ticked on the roof of the car. For a long second, perhaps two, no one inside either vehicle did anything at all.

Then, inside the Mercedes, with a soft, heavy click, the locks began to open.

Nobody got out at once. Zale noted it and filed it with the rest.

The Mercedes sat with its engine running and its dome light dark, rain beading on the black glass. Then the front passenger door opened and a man swung out into the downpour. The blazer was gone. He wore a dark rain shell with the hood up, and his left knee hitched on the landing. The marina guard. He did not look at the shed. He looked at the cliff, the canopy, the guardrail, the drop, one breath for each, and then lifted two fingers toward the truck.

The tractor's door banged. Two men dropped to the asphalt and split without a word, one left along the trailer, one right, rifles slung low. They took the rear corners with their backs to the steel and their faces to the fog. The truck had parked parallel to the pump, a forty-ton wall between the Mercedes and the shed. From the car, no one could see Zale's corner. From the corners, the guards were looking outward, at the road, at the cliff, at everything but the ground under their own trailer.

The Mercedes driver climbed out last, a heavy man in a gray coat. He thumbed the fuel cap open and took the nozzle from the pump.

The rear door of the Mercedes stayed shut. Behind the glass a shape sat very upright in the dark, doing nothing. The window was down two fingers, and from the gap a thread of warm air steamed into the rain.

*Voss.*

The truck's engine rattled in its chest. Every forty seconds the driver blipped the throttle to hold his air pressure, and the roar climbed and flattened the rain, the pump, the sea, everything, for six full seconds. Zale had counted three of them already. He held his breath through a fourth.

The trunk of the Mercedes popped.

The marina guard walked around to it and lifted out a flat steel case, the size of a thick atlas, and tucked it under his arm like a man carrying a lunch. He started along the flank of the trailer toward the cab, inside the long shadow of the steel, where the corner guards couldn't see him and didn't need to. A courier route. The same route every Thursday, probably.

Zale left the wall.

He went low, with his belly nearly on the wet concrete and his gloved palms flat, and the rain covered the sound of his boots. Eleven meters of open ground. Rain slid down the back of his neck. He took the first six on his toes and stopped at the pump's shadow, and the throttle blipped.

He moved on the roar. Four steps. The trailer's rear bogie loomed over him, black wheels as tall as his chest, the air thick with hot rubber and raw diesel. He slid in behind the nearest tire and folded himself into the dark between it and the next, and the stink of fuel mixed with wet wool and coated his tongue.

Boots. Rubber on wet asphalt. A slight hitch on the left.

The wire was already in his hands.

The guard's shape slid past the gap, a hooded shadow with the case clamped under one arm. Zale rose out of the wheel well behind him and put the steel over the hood and across the throat in one clean motion, and pulled.

The man's whole body jerked. The case dropped and Zale caught it against his thigh with his knee. Heels scraped. One boot kicked out and clipped a wheel with a flat metallic tock, and the guard's right hand tore up and found Zale's sleeve, and the nails raked down it. Rain ran off the hood into Zale's face. He tasted it. Wet wool pressed against his cheek, the hot, sour smell of a man whose heart was trying to leave.

Don't count. Hold.

The throttle blipped, and the roar rolled over them both like a lid.

When it fell away the guard was heavy in his arms.

He dragged the body backward into the wheel well and laid it against the bogie, and slid the wire off the neck with fingers that did not shake. He pressed two fingers under the jaw. Nothing. He slipped the radio off the dead man's shoulder strap and thumbed it silent, and took the case.

Sixteen seconds.

A pocket on the side of the case held a sleeve of laminated paper. He pulled it free blind, felt it in the dark: a plastic card, a brass key on a loop of red tape, one folded sheet.

The radio hissed against his chest.

"Dva, čisto."

A pause. The rain filled it.

"Tri?"

Zale stopped moving.

The voice had come from the corner of the trailer, bored, flat, one man calling his sector and waiting for the next. Nothing came back. The dead man did not answer. In the dark under the truck, the little black radio in Zale's fist hissed on and off.

"Tri."

Not a question this time.

From the Mercedes, through the open gap of the window, a different voice said one word. Low. Dry. Unhurried, the voice of a man who had never in his life needed to raise it.

"Tri."

Then, quieter: "Okrenite se."

Turn around.

Boots crunched on gravel. Two sets, fast, coming along both sides of the trailer. A flashlight beam skated under the truck and swept across the tire, and Zale was already moving.

He rolled out the far side between the wheels, came up low against the guardrail with the case strapped across his chest, and went over without stopping. A rope, tied to the base of the third post an hour before dawn, ran down the dark face of the cliff. He had checked it twice. He took it in both hands and let the wet slide burn his palms and dropped into the black.

Spit, spit, spit.

The suppressed pistols were quiet and the engine was louder. Rounds cracked off the rock above his head. A chip of stone stung his cheek. The rope ran hot through his gloves and the sea breathed up from below, cold and enormous, and he hit the ledge feet first and bent his knees and rolled into the hollow behind the outcrop and lay still.

Above him, boots crashed to the guardrail. The flashlight beam came over the edge and swung down in a wide white arc across the rocks. It crossed his boot, a foot from his left heel, and moved on, and lifted.

"Ništa."

Nothing.

"Pretražite. Ne ulazite u tunel dok ne kažem."

Search. Nobody enters the tunnel until I say.

Voss. For a long time the rain filled the silence, and then the beam withdrew from the rocks and the voices moved away along the road. A door slammed. The truck's engine dropped to an idle and held there, waiting.

Zale lay on the ledge with the case against his ribs and breathed through his nose in thin, slow ribbons. Four for in. Four out. His pulse ran at fifty, then at seventy, then at fifty again.

He did not look up.

He slid the sleeve from his sleeve-pocket, held it between his body and the stone, and clicked on a pencil light cupped in his palm. The plastic card was white, stamped in black: MERROW FREIGHT / OBJEKAT 3 / ISTOK. East. A magnetic strip ran across the back. The brass key was heavy and cut for a lock that did not open easily, a square dull head, red tape wound twice around the loop. He knew the lock without seeing it. A steel service door in the east wall of a windowless warehouse, eight feet from the left shoulder of a man who stood in the dark and counted.

He unfolded the sheet. A column of six digits in a small, square, soldier's hand. Beneath it, four lines of numbers: latitude, longitude, a depth in meters. The coordinates of a place under a harbor he had spent a week learning from above. And at the bottom, circled twice in the same pen, two words.

*UTORAK. GOSPOĐA.*

Tuesday. The Lady.

He turned the light off. Above him, the diesel rumbled on, and a long way down the cliff the sea went in and out, patient as a sleeper.

He had not come for Voss tonight. He had come for the door. And in the dark, with his back against the rock and the key in his fist, he could hear the first thread of the colonel's network snap.