THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

Chapter 12: THE GHOST OF THE QUAY

The lock rattled again, and this time a bolt slid.

Zale had the screen dark before the sound finished. One keystroke closed the map. Another dropped the terminal back to the blue lock screen it had shown him when he sat down. He lifted the key and card off the steel, wiped the desk edge with his sleeve where his forearm had rested, and slid off the stool onto the outside edges of his boots.

Four minutes, forty. Not enough anymore.

At the far end of the building a door screamed on its hinges. Light fell in a long white blade across the floor, and with it came voices, three men talking low in the bored Montenegrin of the day shift, boots slapping concrete. A flashlight beam jerked over the girders and swung down into the central aisle.

He went the other way.

Not toward the exit. Toward the bunks. The lane behind the steel beds ran narrow and dark along the east wall, with a drain in the floor, and the day men would walk the center first, where the work was. He took the lane at a crouch, rubber soles rolling heel to toe, and the smell rose to meet him. Bleach, sharp enough to sting his eyes, and under it something the bleach had never quite covered. He breathed through his mouth and did not look at the frames.

A beam slid along the racks to his left, white, patient, crate after crate. He dropped flat behind a pallet of packing straw. The dry grass smell filled his nose, dusty and sweet and ordinary. Inches from his cheek, a split crate lid showed a gleam of gun oil on gray foam.

"Hladno je kao u grobu," one of the men said. Cold as a grave.

"Pali grijanje."

"Neće da radi."

Boots. Fifteen feet. Zale closed his hand around the wire in his pocket and held still. The beam crossed the straw above his head and the dust lit up like snow.

Then the main bay door began to open. Chain dragged through steel, a long grinding clank as loud as a train, and the light swung away toward the noise.

He moved on it. Ten meters, twenty, the lane opening, the east wall rising out of the dark with the service door set in it like the slot of a safe. A push bar on the inside. A spring latch above it, the kind that bit shut on its own. He laid his palm on the cold bar and listened. Through an inch of steel, nothing.

The coordinator had a metronome in his neck. Zale had timed it from the corner on the way in: left, a count of two, right, a count of two, thirteen seconds a sweep. For two of those seconds the man faced the far end of the quay with his back to this door.

The chain clanked again. He pushed.

The door gave without a sound. Fog came in wet and heavy, and he slid out into it and eased the steel shut behind him, and the latch bit.

The cold was alive out here. After the dry, dead cold of the warehouse it laid a hand on his whole face. Eight feet away the coordinator stood with his back to the wall and his head turned left, toward the bay door and the noise.

One. Two.

The head began to swing right.

Zale went down and left along the wall, away from the sweep of the man's eyes, fingertips trailing the wet corrugated steel. He felt the head's travel as pressure between his shoulder blades. At the end of the wall the container stack began, and he rolled into the black wedge beneath it and lay on his belly in an inch of oily water. Above him a pair of boots turned a half circle on the concrete.

The thumb touched the leg.

He stayed under the steel for a full minute. Then he crawled out along the rusted legs of Crane Number Two, reached the slip, and let the bay take him without a splash.

---

At 5:40 on Tuesday the cold had teeth.

The watchtower stood on a spur above the outer anchorage, three hundred years old and mostly gone. A ring of Venetian stone, a stair that led nowhere, a gap in the wall where an archer had once stood. Zale lay in the gap on his stomach with a wool blanket over his shoulders and the monocular against his right eye. Frost whitened the stone. His breath smoked and froze in his lashes. The air smelled of salt, frozen pine, and woodsmoke from some village still asleep.

Below him the Bay of Kotor lay black and flat between its mountains. The peaks held the first gray of dawn on their tops and would not let it down. A thin mist moved over the water. No wind, no gulls, only the faint metal ticking of the harbor cranes, far off.

Then a sound came up the bay. Low and slow, a big hull moving through water too quietly for its size.

She came out of the mist like a decision.

White. Ninety-one meters of it, long and low and clean, with no deck clutter, no jet ski, no guests. One pale lamp burned on the bridge and nothing else. The bow parted the mist without a ripple. She ran in on electric drive, and her wake barely touched the shore, and when she stopped the silence she left was larger than the noise had been.

The anchor went down. Chain ran out in an iron rattle that rolled around the mountains and came back from every side. Then nothing.

He read the flank through the lens. Brushed-gold script. *GOSPOĐA.*

A light came on at her stern. A hatch dropped in the transom and a launch slid out on a cradle, matte black, twelve meters, no markings, and touched the sea with a soft slap. Two men in dark coats stood at the gunwales. Neither looked at the shore. They looked at the person between them.

One figure, standing very still at the stern in a long pale coat, hands in the pockets, face turned toward the quay. No hurry. No shift of weight. The launch's engines caught and its bow began to swing.

Zale turned the focus with his thumb.

He did not know the face yet. He knew the stillness. He had seen it in a man's neck on a quay, in a colonel's voice from the back of a car, in the quiet of a recording that had told Gerald he was sweating on her floor.

He locked the lens on her and began to count the seconds to shore.

The launch swung, leveled out, and stopped.

It did not run for the shore. It idled a hundred meters off the rocks with its engines muttering, a black shape on gray water, and a spotlight on its bow swept the stone landing below the road and went out. A pause. Then a small red lamp blinked twice from the cliff stairs, and the launch began to creep forward.

Someone ashore had cleared it. Someone who expected to be waited on.

Zale folded the monocular into its case. His knees cracked when he stood. He scuffed the dark patch his body had melted in the frost and went down the stair that led nowhere, into the olive grove. He walked the grass edge of the path where it muffled, between trees bent and silver, and found the rented Fiat behind a field wall. He sat inside with the dome light off and did not start the engine.

Now the mask.

It was harder than the yacht. The body that had crawled the quay on its elbows did not want to be a sleepwalker. It held its shoulders square and its jaw set. He shoved the gloves, the cap, the dark shell under the seat and pulled on a wrinkled linen shirt, buttoned wrong, collar crooked. He raked his hair until it stood up and pinched the bridge of his nose until his eyes watered pink.

In the mirror a boy looked back. Zale loosened his mouth into a sheepish smile, and an ache started behind his back teeth almost at once, where the jaw had to be held slack. He kept it there. Thirteen years had taught his face to stay still. The hardest thing anyone had ever asked of it was to stop.

He started the car.

Down the coast road the day came up in stages. Gray first, then a thin yellow smear along the ridge that lit the wet cliffs one at a time. Delivery vans rumbled out of side streets with their headlights burning. Through the cracked window the air smelled of raw diesel and damp stone and the sour tail of the night.

At a kiosk below Perast he bought coffee in a paper cup, black as tar. The woman at the window looked him over, crooked collar, red eyes, and muttered something about tourists. He grinned and said "Hvala" in a terrible accent.

Back behind the wheel he took one sip, burned his tongue, and tipped half the cup down the front of his shirt. The heat bit through the cotton into his chest. He let it. Good.

The south road ran straight under the cliff for the last kilometer, and at the end of it the old pump stood in the gray light under its tin canopy, shabby and a little sad, as if nothing had ever happened there. Four days of rain had washed the asphalt clean.

The black Mercedes sat angled across the apron with its nose toward the road, plate KO 418 MK, its rear window down two fingers and a still shape behind the glass. Behind it, a gray van. The driver in the gray coat leaned on the fender with his arms folded. Two men in dark jackets stood at the road edge with their backs to the cliff, and a third waited at the head of the stone stair that dropped beside the pump to the little private landing below.

Four men. Nobody smoked, nobody talked. The nearest jacket hung wrong at the left hip, a hard line under the cloth. The man at the stair kept a hand in a pocket too deep for the weather. Zale logged the distances: the Mercedes at eleven meters, the stair at nine.

On the concrete in front of the pump, in a navy overcoat, Gerald walked short circles like a man outside a delivery room. He had pulled off one glove and was turning the signet ring on his finger, round and round.

Zale drove in too fast and braked too late. The Fiat slewed across the wet concrete and stopped with its bumper a meter from the pump, rocking. He sat with his head hanging and let the engine die with a cough. Four heads turned. One hand moved.

He climbed out clumsily, caught his foot on the sill, said "Whoa," and grabbed the roof. The paper cup slipped from his fingers and bounced across the apron, leaving a brown trail.

"Hey!" he called, in his loosest, most grateful voice. "Is this the way to Kotor? The old town? My phone died and I think I turned left at a goat."

Nobody answered. The man at the stair took two steps toward him. The driver unfolded his arms.

"Uncle G?" Zale squinted and let his mouth fall open. "What are you doing out here? It's, like, six in the morning."

Gerald turned.

The color left his face in a slow tide. His thumb stopped on the ring. For a second the whole front of him gave way, like a man stepping onto a stair that wasn't there. Then the mouth shut, and the old patronizing smile came down over it, too late and too stiff.

"Zale. What the hell are you doing here?"

"I'm lost!" Zale spread his arms. The wet shirt stuck to his ribs. "Brecken passed out, so I went for a drive, and now I'm out of gas. And coffee." He looked down at the stain and laughed. "I'm such an idiot."

The man by the stair had his hand inside his jacket now, resting. Zale registered it the way he registered weather. Left hand, high, cross draw. Seven meters. Between them, the pump, a puddle, the Fiat's open door.

"Get in your car," Gerald said, "and go back to town."

"Sure. Totally. I just need a bathroom first. Like, really need one."

Below the cliff a low diesel purr rose and settled against stone. A hull touching a landing.

Every head on the apron turned toward the stairs. Even Gerald's. The man with his hand in his jacket took it out and walked, fast, to the top of the steps.

Zale stayed where he was and scratched his neck. Through half-closed lids he watched the head of the stair. Boots on stone. One pair, light and unhurried. Two heavier pairs behind. The Mercedes driver crossed to the rear door and stood beside it, spine straight.

The figure came up the last step into the gray light.

A long pale coat, belted. Gloved hands. Silver-blond hair cut close to the skull. She walked past the guards without looking at them, past Gerald without looking at him, and Gerald gave way half a pace as she went by, the way a man makes room for a wind. The driver opened the rear door.

She stopped with one hand on the frame.

Then she turned her head. Not toward the car. Not toward Gerald. Toward the idiot by the pump with coffee on his shirt.

Zale kept his eyes soft and unfocused, the eyes of a boy who couldn't hold a thought. Through the blur of his lashes he saw her face for the first time.

A calm face. Fifty, perhaps. Very pale. High cheekbones, a thin straight mouth, eyes the gray of the sky behind her, level, and entirely without surprise. She looked at him the way she might look at a crate coming off a ship.

Then something moved at the corner of that mouth. It was not quite a smile. It was the look of a woman who has just found the missing weight.