THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

Chapter 7: THE RED CRANE

The water was eleven degrees. Zale knew because the dive watch on his left wrist said so, in small green numerals, and because his body had stopped arguing with the number about forty minutes ago.

He floated chest-deep in the shadow of the old ferry slip with his chin just above the surface. Black neoprene under black tactical shell, a mesh hood over his hair, grease paint on the skin around his eyes. The pilings around him were furred with weed and rotted to the color of old tea. Each time the swell lifted him, the timber groaned and a little shower of rust-brown flakes dropped into the bay. Salt had dried on his lips and cracked them. He tasted iron and brine and did not lick them.

It was the following Tuesday, 3:34 a.m., and the harbor was awake.

Fog lay low over the water, thin as breath on glass, and the floodlights turned it to a pale smoke that moved along the quay in slow sheets. Eleven poles. He had counted them again on arrival and found them where the satellite photo had put them. Past the last one, the red crane stood against the dark with its long neck raised and its cables hanging slack.

Number Two. It was the color of dried blood in the lamplight, rust bleeding down its legs in long stains, and it looked like a thing that had been left outside to die. Then its operator's cab lit from within, a small yellow square forty feet up, and a motor somewhere in the frame turned over with a cough and settled into a low, ugly growl. The whole structure shivered once. A cable began to run.

The squeal reached him a second later. Steel wire dragging over a dry sheave, a thin raw note that climbed and climbed and cut across the water like a nail on slate. Zale's teeth ached with it.

He eased the listener out of the chest pocket of his shell.

It was warm from his body. Matte black, finger-length, the lens covered with a cap he'd thumbed off an hour ago. He braced the base against the piling, laid his cheek to the damp timber, and let the barrel find the nearest of the guards. A small earpiece, wired and waterproofed, carried the sound into his skull.

Wind first. Then the slap of water on concrete, and the cold, constant diesel drone of something big idling at the quay. Under it, boots. Two men, walking in step.

"Dva, čisto," a voice said, flat as a plate.

"Tri. Čisto."

That was all. No joke between them, no cough, no mutter about the cold. The words came every forty seconds like a clock tick, one man calling his sector and another answering, and each reply came in the same dead tone. Zale waited for slack in it. A yawn. A swear. A man scratching himself. Nothing came.

He swung the barrel along the quay.

Six guards on the apron. He had made it six on the first sweep and now confirmed it. Dark jackets, dark caps, short rifles slung muzzle-down and held across the body by the right hand. They walked with their weight forward on the balls of their feet. When a guard reached the end of his beat he did not stop and lean on a stack. He turned, clean as a pivot on a hinge, and walked back the way he had come. They kept eleven meters between them. Zale measured it against the light poles and the number held.

Nobody looked at the ship. They looked at the dark on either side of it.

*Patrol. Not guard duty.* Each man swept his own arc and handed it off to the next, and the arcs overlapped like the cones of the lamps. He had spent three years in a gym in the mountains with men who had walked this way for a living. He recognized the posture the way he would have recognized a word in his own language.

The ship came out of the fog like a building being pushed.

He felt it before he saw it. A deep throb in the water, a pressure that rolled through his ribs and set the pilings shivering. Then a long black wall slid into the lamplight, higher than the warehouse roof, rust-streaked and blunt, with white letters on the bow. *MARISA K.* Tugs nosed at her flank, small and furious, throwing foam. The diesels rumbled through the hull in a low pulse, steady as a heart. Warm exhaust drifted across the water and the air turned sulfurous, thick with heavy marine oil, so rich it coated the back of his throat.

She berthed with a long grinding kiss against the fenders. Lines flew. Men in orange vests caught them and wrapped them around bollards. Zale watched the faces, not the ropes. They were dockhands, tired and bored, and they kept their eyes down and their hands busy. None of them wore a cap like the guards'. None looked toward the warehouse.

3:51.

He turned the listener to the gantry.

Crane Number Two lowered its spreader onto the deck with a clank that shook the quay. A man in a hard hat stood on the ship's rail waving his arms. Hooks bit. The first container, blue, scabbed with salt, lifted free of its stack and swung up and over the lip of the hull with its cables singing.

Another voice came through the earpiece then, close and quiet. Not a guard. A man speaking low into a handset as he walked.

"Pet minuta. Kontejner sedam, osam, devet. Ne dirati."

Five minutes. Containers seven, eight, nine. Do not touch.

Zale found him.

He was not on the apron. He stood at the edge of the shadow beside the warehouse's eastern wall, in the dead ground between two lamps, a slim man in a gray field jacket with no rank on it and no weapon in sight. Hands empty. Cap pulled low. He did not patrol. He stood and watched the patrols, and every time a guard completed a turn, the man's right thumb touched the side of his leg. A small, exact motion.

He was counting them.

*The man whose only job is to watch the other men.*

Zale held still and let the swell lift him and settle him again. The coordinator's gaze traveled along the quay at an even speed, left to right, pausing for the length of a breath on each lamp, each stack, each dark gap. When it reached the water it slowed. It reached the ferry slip. It lingered.

Zale stopped breathing and let his body go slack in the current, one more piece of drifting timber. His heart rate dropped. In the narrow gray slit of the hood he watched the man's face turn the width of a hand toward the pilings and then, without hurry, move on.

*Ashtray moved,* he thought. *Not this time.*

The coordinator lifted his handset again.

"Šest," he said. "Okreni se."

Six. Turn around. On the apron, the sixth guard turned.

Zale logged it. One man, one voice, one fixed spot. The man did not leave the shadow by the east wall for the full length of the unloading. Which meant that if the coordinator stood there every Tuesday, a man who knew where to look could study the dark behind him, a few meters of wall and a steel service door he had marked on the satellite print in pencil. A latch, a hinge, a blind angle, eight feet from the coordinator's left shoulder.

That was the soft place. Not soft. Thin.

The first container touched down on a flatbed with a hiss of brakes. A yellow forklift trundled up, and then a second flatbed, and a long line of trucks began to creep along the quay with their lights off. The coordinator murmured another number into his handset. Cables slackened, tightened, ran again.

Zale put his eye to the low-light monocular and fixed it on the third container, number nine, still swaying under the red neck of the crane. Its door seal gleamed in the glare. Fresh paint, a dark smear around the hinge. Somebody had opened it since it left the last port. It hung there for a long second, rocking. The crane operator eased it down.

The steel service door in the warehouse wall opened.

It opened outward, quietly, spilling a rectangle of yellow light across the wet concrete. The coordinator did not turn his head. The guards did not look. Whoever came through it had been expected.

A man stepped out onto the apron.

Tall. Navy overcoat, buttoned to the throat, leather gloves. A broad, florid face, tan gone sallow in the glare. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the swaying box as if it were something he owned, and a faint gleam winked on the third finger of his right hand when he turned his wrist. A signet ring.

Zale's pulse, which had held at fifty for forty minutes, skipped one beat, hammering hard against his ribs.

Gerald Hale.

Zale’s fingers tightened on the rotted wood of the piling until the grain splintered under his gloves. His mind spun, rapidly re-calculating the geometry of the entire room forty-one floors above downtown. Gerald was never part of the arrangement. That was Crane's own folly.

Gerald hadn't been taking orders from a local smuggling boss over the phone on Sunday morning. He had been talking to whoever was standing inside this windowless warehouse right now. Gerald hadn't stayed behind to manage a nervous board of directors; he had boarded a private transport immediately after Zale left his office, flying down the coast to oversee the Kotor shipment himself.

The playboy's bumbling uncle was gone. In his place stood a man who watched a container of black-market cargo lowered onto a flatbed with the cold, steady eye of an owner.

Gerald turned his head, whispering something to the slim coordinator in the gray jacket. The coordinator nodded once, a sharp, military jerk of the chin, and touched his handset. On the quay, the flatbed engine growled, its tires spitting gravel as it began to haul container number nine toward the loading apron.

Gerald watched it go, then stepped back through the steel service door, pulling the yellow light back into the warehouse behind him. The door clicked shut, leaving the apron dark again.

Zale let his chin drop back to the level of the freezing water, his teeth clicking together in the dark. The list in his breast pocket had just grown complicated. The man who had signed his family's execution order wasn't sitting safely across the Atlantic waiting for his turn at the bottom of the column. He was here, forty paces away, inside a fortified perimeter guarded by men who didn't smoke on duty.

The wind howled down from the peaks of the Lovćen massif, tearing the fog into long, jagged ribbons across the bay.

Zale cleared the salt from his lips, his eyes locked onto the black line of the service door seam. The bumbling heir was gone. The target had moved.

The hunt for Dominic Voss had just become a direct confrontation with the man who stole his father's life.