Evil Deeds (Bob Danforth 1) (11 page)

The trip from Athens to the Bulgarian border took Bob and George four hours. They parked Bob’s car in a grocery store parking lot, walked five miles to the border, and waited in a wooded area for night to fall. They watched the Greek Army border units for hours, timing their patrols, and then at 3:20 a.m., George came out of the dense woods in a crouch and scooted from tree to tree in the buffer area leading up to the empty, moonlit, hundred-yard slash of the border. Bob followed closely behind him. About to break from the tree cover, George dropped to the ground and signaled Bob to do the same. A Greek Army patrol, breaking the usual patrol time routine, appeared from behind a large rock outcropping on their right. The soldiers were talking and smoking cigarettes while they slowly strolled along
.

After the patrol passed, George and Bob rose and ran for the barbed-wire fence separating Greece and Bulgaria.

It was 4 a.m., a mile west of where Bob and George crossed the Bulgarian border, when Stefan Radko and his son Gregorie waited for a Greek patrol to pass by. Stefan turned toward his son. Moonlight highlighted the boy’s pale features, his wide-open eyes, and the grim set to his mouth. Gregorie would be able to move faster than Vanja – an advantage. But the boy had never been part of this before and might make a mistake.

The baby girl slept in Gregorie’s arms. Stefan hoped she would remain asleep at least until they had crossed to the Bulgarian side. “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut,” Stefan hissed at Gregorie.

Gregorie nodded his head several times.

The Petrich Orphanage’s massive wrought iron gates in the high, white, moonlit wall gaped open. Without lights, the building behind the wall appeared foreboding, a looming dark-gray presence.

“Something’s wrong,” George said. “Those gates were never left open during my time here. And there was always a light on at the front. And now there’s no guard. There was
always
a guard.”

Bob followed George across the road that paralleled the wall. Imitating George, he pressed himself against the wall’s stuccoed surface and edged to the gate to peer into the grounds. Still no one. They sprinted up the gravel drive, between tall evergreens lining both sides.

“Stay close,” George ordered, while they climbed the front steps.

When George pushed on the heavy front door, it slowly swung open. They stepped inside and, after Bob had shut the door, both men switched on their hooded flashlights.

George ran a hand over his face as though to wipe away the memory of his past here. Then he led the way into a high-ceilinged lobby. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Even at night, this place always felt alive, like the building was breathing. It scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. Now it feels dead.”

Bob pointed his flashlight upward, staring at the twenty-foot-high ceilings and the ornate-carved crown moldings running around the lobby. A design had been sculpted in the ceiling and a mosaic he couldn’t quite determine in the muted light from his flashlight had been laid in the marble floor.

George moved out of the lobby and down a hallway leading off to the right.

The first room on the right was empty. Discolored squares on the walls showed where pictures had hung. A file cabinet stood in a corner, its empty drawers gaping open. All the bookshelves were bare. Vagrant pieces of paper lay scattered around the room. Velvet drapes covered the windows.

“This was the director’s office,” George said.

Bob ran his hand over the top of the file cabinet. “There’s barely any dust here,” he said. “They evacuated this building very recently. Like yesterday, or even today.”

All the other rooms along the hallway had been stripped. The last room was the size of a basketball court.

“We ate all our meals here in the dining room,” George said, circling the room. “Three times a day we sat here like good little soldiers.” His voice echoed off the walls of the cavernous room. “Sit up straight! No talking! Clean your plates!”

Let’s check the second floor,” Bob said.

“Okay, but let’s be quick,” George answered.

They raced up the curving, marble stairway two steps at a time and began poking into rooms on either side of the stairs.

Bob found nothing but almost empty rooms. He kicked at a mattress rolled up in a corner of the last room. “Dammit!” he muttered. “This can’t be happening!”

George was waiting for him at the head of the staircase.

“Come on, Bob,” he said. “It’s time to get out of here.”

Gregorie stood in the dark, first-floor hallway, cradling the baby. The only light was the faint glow of moonlight coming through the windows of the rooms on the right side of the hallway. Through the open door, he watched his father sweep a flashlight beam around a room that must have been an office – a dented file cabinet with empty drawers askew, a few papers scattered on the floor, a broken desk chair lying on its side. Stefan kicked the chair.

“The bastards have deserted the place,” Radko growled. “I won’t make a dime off that brat.”

Gregorie felt the baby begin to stir in his arms. Without warning, she wailed.

“Keep her quiet,” Stefan growled.

“She’s probably hungry,” Gregorie said. “What do you want me to do, nurse her?”

Stefan shot him a vicious look, making him shrink back a step. “You shut your mouth!” he snarled. “You ever talk to me like that again and I’ll rip your balls off! No one talks to Stefan Radko like that.”

George’s heart seemed to stop. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard: Stefan Radko, the name of the Gypsy Meers’ agent gave him in the car on the beach. Stefan Radko: the ringleader of the kidnappings, the man responsible for so much anguish and suffering. A man just like Radko had taken him from his own parents twenty-five years earlier. Maybe it had been Radko himself.

Bob was hunkered down near the bottom of the staircase, a few feet below where George knelt on a step and pointed his gun between the railing posts toward the voices. George heard footsteps growing louder on the hall’s marble floor. When the footsteps began reverberating off the walls and ceiling of the lobby, he clicked on his flashlight, lighting up a man and a teenaged boy. Yelling in Bulgarian, he ordered them to stop and put up their hands.

Bob shouted, “Watch out, George, he’s got a gun.”

“Drop the gun or I’ll shoot,” George yelled.

The man raised his left hand to shield his eyes against the flashlight beam. He seemed disoriented by the sudden bright light. Dropping his pistol on the floor, he said something to the teenager in a strange language.

George saw a swaddled infant in the teenager’s arms. The baby squealed. The boy took a step toward the older man, and then suddenly turned and bolted out of sight down the corridor.

Bob and George started down the stairs to the lobby when the boy suddenly returned, no baby in his arms but a pistol in his hand.

“Gregorie, No!” the man shouted from where he stood in the middle of the lobby, highlighted in George’s flashlight beam, his hands over his head. Then the man wheeled and ran out the open front door. “Gregorie, run!” the man called before vanishing through the doorway.

But the boy began shooting at Bob and George. Bob returned fire. In the flashlight’s funnel beam Bob saw the boy pitch backwards, hit the wall, and slide to the floor.

Bob ran the rest of the way down the staircase to where the boy lay spread-eagled on the floor.

George ran down to the lobby to the front door. “Bob, let’s go! We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Hold on,” Bob hissed. He checked the boy’s body. One round from Bob’s .45 had impacted the kid’s chest; another round had torn his throat. He pocketed the boy’s pistol. Stupid kid, Bob thought.

Bob ran from the lobby into the hallway. On the floor in the first empty room on the left, he found the infant the boy had been holding. He stuck his .45 in his jacket pocket, scooped her up, and moved back toward the lobby. But, after just four steps, he heard a door opening at the end of the corridor. He turned at the moment muzzle flashes sparked from a weapon.

Bob dove to the marble floor, landing on his side to protect the baby. There was a sharp, prickling feeling in his right calf. He reached down, touched the spot, and jerked his hand away when shards of pain shot through his lower leg. He touched his fingers to his tongue and tasted the sweetness of blood. He crawled to the covering shadows of the side wall. He adjusted his hold on the baby and fumbled for his pistol. It was wedged inside his jacket pocket. Two more shots came from the end of the hall. Then he heard approaching footsteps.

Bob knew time was running out. He could make out the outline of the man down the hall – now only a few yards away. Then shots exploded from the lobby.

“Get out of there,” George yelled.

Bob scrambled to his feet and, in a crouching run, made it to the lobby. He leaped behind the side wall and ripped the pistol from his jacket pocket.

George moved sideways toward him. But the whining echo of a gunshot filled the lobby and George grunted and dropped to the floor.

Bob fired two shots down the hall and heard the clatter of what sounded like a pistol hitting the marble floor. Then the man there said something sounding like a curse. Bob laid the baby on the floor and reached out with his free hand for the neck of George’s jacket. He pulled him toward him, out of the line of fire.

“Shit!” George groaned.

Bob unsnapped George’s jacket. Blood already saturated the lower left side of George’s shirt and dripped onto the floor, pooling and moving in a slow, inexorable flow toward the screaming baby.

Bob sloughed off his pack and opened it. He searched blindly with his hand for the first-aid kit, while peeking around the corner. He could hear someone moving around, but couldn’t see a thing.

“Go!” George whispered. “If you don’t get away quickly, either that guy’s going to shoot you or the local police are going to show up. Either way, you’ll be finished. You’ll never have the chance to find your son.”

“Shut up, George,” Bob replied.

“Think of Michael,” George gasped.

Bob knew his odds of getting out of this building and out of Bulgaria, and of ever seeing his wife and son again, were worsening by the second. But he wouldn’t abandon George. He hadn’t left his dead and wounded behind in Vietnam – no matter the risk, no matter the consequences – and he wouldn’t do it now. Despite the pain he felt in his heart as he conjured up images of Liz and Michael.

Bob removed George’s pack and found the first aid kit Liz had packed there.

“You’ve got to stop exposing your chest,” he said. “First a knife wound and now a gun shot.”

George groaned. “I’ll try to remember that.”

Bob dressed the wound in George’s side with wads of cotton and then pressed an adhesive dressing over the wound. Pulling up George’s shirt in back, he saw an exit wound and hoped the bullet hadn’t passed through any organs. He guessed it had not based on the little amount of blood seeping from the wound. He glanced once more around the corner. For good measure, he picked up the .45 from the floor and fired a shot into the dark corridor. He heard running footsteps recede down the corridor and a door slam shut. Then he stuck the pistol in his jacket pocket and patched up the exit wound in George’s side.

Bob swung George’s pack over a shoulder and helped George to his feet, leaning him against the wall. He then picked up the squalling baby, holding her against his chest, letting her suck on his little finger, something he’d done with Michael. She quieted down. Then Bob wrapped his other arm around George and struggled to the front entrance. After descending the steps, keeping to the trees along the driveway, he slowly made his way to the main gate.