Long Lost (Myron Bolitar) (19 page)
No sunglasses. Blue windbreaker now. A baseball cap that hadn’t been there at the cemetery. But I knew. It was my guy. And he was good. People have a tendency to remember very little. Guy with sunglasses and close-cropped hair. Throw a cap on, a windbreaker over your T-shirt—no one will notice you unless they’re looking hard.
I had almost missed it, but now I knew for sure: I was being followed. My boy from the graveyard was back.
There were several ways to play this, but I was not in the mood to be coy. I walked down a narrow corridor toward the rooms they used for meetings and conferences. It was a Sunday so they were empty. I folded my arms, leaned against the coatroom, and waited for my man to make an appearance.
When he did—five minutes later—I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him into the coatroom. “Why are you following me?”
He looked at me confused.
“Is it my strong chin? My hypnotic blue eyes? My shapely ass? By the way, do these pants make me look fat? Tell me the truth.”
The man stared for another second, maybe two, and then he did what I had done earlier: He just attacked.
He led with a palm strike toward my face. I blocked it. He spun and threw an elbow. Fast. Faster than I’d anticipated. The blow landed on the left side of my chin. I turned my head to lesson the impact, but I could still feel my teeth rattle. He kept the attack going, throwing another blow, then a side kick, then a fist to the body. The body shot landed the hardest, on the bottom of the rib cage. It would hurt. If you ever watch boxing on TV, even casually, you will hear every announcer say the same things: Body shots accumulate. The opponent will feel them in the late rounds. That’s true and it’s not. Body shots also hurt right now. They make you cringe and lower your defenses.
I was in trouble.
Part of my brain started berating myself—stupid to do this without a weapon or Win as backup. Most of my brain, however, had kicked into survival mode. Even the most seemingly innocent fight—at a bar, a sporting event, whatever—will make your adrenaline go haywire because your body knows what maybe your mind doesn’t want to accept: This is about survival. You could very well die.
I fell to the ground and rolled away. The coatroom was small. This guy knew what he was doing. He stayed on me, trying to rain down foot stomps, chasing me. He landed a kick to my head; stars exploded like something out of a cartoon. I debated yelling for help, anything to get him to stop.
I rolled a second or so more, noticed his timing. I left my gut open, hoping he would go for it with a kick. He did. As he started to cock his knee, I reverse-rolled toward him, bent at the waist, got my hands ready. The kick landed in ye olde bread basket, but I was ready for it. I clamped his foot against my body with both hands and rolled hard. He had two choices. Fall quickly to the ground or have his ankle bone snap like a dried twig.
He knew to throw blows as he fell, but for the most part they were ineffective.
We were both on the ground. I was hurt and dazed, but I had two major advantages now. One, I still had his foot, though I could feel that grip loosening. Two, now that we were on the ground, well, size became important—and I mean that in a clean way. I was holding his leg with both hands. He tried to punch his way through. I moved closer to him, ducking my head into his chest. When an opponent is throwing punches, most people think that they should give the guy some distance. But it’s just the opposite. You put your face into his chest and smother his power. That was what I did here.
He tried to box my ears, but that required both hands, leaving him vulnerable. I lifted my head hard and fast and caught him under the chin. He reeled back. I fell on top of him.
Now the fight was about leverage and technique and size. I had him beat right now in two of the three—leverage and size. I was still dizzy from the initial attack but the head butt had helped. I still had his leg. I gave it a vicious twist. He rolled with it and that was when he made the big mistake.
He turned his back to me, exposing it.
I let go and jumped on him, my legs snaking around his waist, my right arm around his neck. He knew what was coming. Panic made him start bucking. He dropped his chin to block my elbow. I whacked him in the back of the head with a palm strike. That weakened him just enough. I quickly gripped his forehead and tugged back. He tried to fight it, but I raised his chin just enough. My elbow sneaked underneath the opening and reached his throat. The choke hold was set.
I had him now. It was just a question of time.
And then I heard a noise, a voice actually, shouting in a foreign language. I debated letting go to see who it was, but I held on. That was my mistake. A second man had entered the room. He hit me in the back of the neck, probably with a knife hand, what you’d call a classic karate chop. A numbness swept through me as if my entire body had just become my funny bone banged the wrong way. My grip loosened.
I heard the man shout again, in the same foreign language. It confused me. The first man slipped out of my grip, gasping for breath. He rolled away. There were two of them now. I looked at the second man. He pointed a gun at me.
I was finished.
“Don’t move,” the man said to me with a foreign accent.
My brain searched for an out, but I was too far away. The first man rose to his feet. He was still breathing hard. We looked at each other, our eyes met, and I saw something strange there. Not hatred. Respect maybe. I don’t know.
I looked at the man with the gun again.
“Don’t move,” he said a second time. “And don’t follow us.”
Then they both ran away.
19
I stumbled to the elevator. I hoped that I could make it to my room without being seen, but the elevator stopped in the lobby. A family of six Americans looked at me, at my torn shirt and bleeding mouth and all the rest of it, and still got on and said, “Hi!” For the next few floors I heard the big sister picking on the brother and the mother begging them to stop and the father trying to ignore them and the other two siblings pinching each other when the parents weren’t looking.
When I got to the room, Terese freaked out, but only briefly. She helped me in and called Win. Win arranged for a doctor. The doctor came quickly and declared nothing broken. I would be okay. My head hurt, probably from a concussion. I craved rest. The doctor gave me something and everything became a little fuzzy. The next thing I remember was sensing Win standing across the dark room. I opened one eye, then the other.
Win said, “You’re an idiot.”
“No, I’m fine, really, don’t start with all the concern.”
“You should have waited for me.”
“Nobody likes a Monday morning quarterback.” I struggled to sit up. My body was somewhat willing; my head shrieked in protest. I grabbed my skull with both hands, trying to keep it from splitting open.
“I think I learned something,” I said.
“I’m listening.”
The curtains were still open. Darkness had fallen. I looked at my watch. It was ten PM now, and I remembered something. “The graveyard,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Are they exhuming the body?”
“You still want to go?”
I nodded and quickly got dressed. I didn’t bother saying good-bye to Terese. We had discussed it earlier—she saw no reason to be there. Win had a limo pick us up at the front entrance, pull into a private lot, and then we changed cars.
“Here,” Win said.
He handed me a mini-revolver, the NAA Black Widow. I looked at it. “A twenty-two?”
Win usually favored larger weapons. Like, say, bazookas or rocket launchers.
“The UK has some pretty strict laws against carrying a firearm.” He handed me a nylon ankle holster. “Better to keep it concealed.”
“Is that what you’re carrying?”
“Heavens no. Do you want something bigger?”
I didn’t. I strapped it onto my ankle. It reminded me of a brace I used when I played basketball.
When we arrived at the cemetery, I expected to be more ghouled out, if you will, but I wasn’t. The two men were standing in the hole, almost done. They both wore matching aqua blue velour sweat suits from my aunt Sophie’s Miami collection. The majority of the digging had been done earlier in the day by a small yellow excavator that sat to the right as if looking down at its handiwork. The two velour-clad gents just needed to scrape the coffin enough to open it and remove a few samples, some bone or something, and then they could close it back up and pour the dirt back over the contents.
Okay, maybe now I was feeling ghoulish.
A misty rain fell upon us. I stood and looked down. Win did too. It was dark, but our eyes had adjusted enough to see the shadows. The men were bent low now, almost out of sight.
“You said you learned something.”
I nodded. “The men following me. They spoke Hebrew and knew Krav Maga.”
Krav Maga is an Israeli martial art.
“And,” Win added, “they were good.”
“You see where I’m going with this?”
“A good tail, good fighter, got away without killing you, spoke Hebrew.” Win nodded. “Mossad.”
“Explains all the interest.”
Below us, we heard one of the men curse.
“Is there a problem?” Win called down.
“They put a bleeding lock on these things,” a voice said. He flicked on the flashlight. Now all we could see was the coffin. “For cripes’ sake, why? My house doesn’t have a lock this strong. We’re trying different keys.”
“Break it,” Win said.
“You sure?”
“Who’s going to know?”
The two men forced up a laugh the way, well, men digging up a grave might. “True, right that,” one said.
Win turned his attention back to me. “So why would Rick Collins be involved with Mossad?”
“No clue.”
“And why would a car accident from ten years ago reach a level where the Israeli secret service would show interest?”
“Again, no clue.”
Win thought about it. “I will call Zorra. Maybe she can help.”
Zorra, a very dangerous cross-dresser who had helped us out in the past, had worked for Mossad in the late eighties.
“That could work.” I thought about it. “Suppose the guy I hit with the table was Mossad. That might explain a few things.”
“Like why Interpol would freak out when we tried to get an ID,” Win said.
I thought about that. “But if he was Mossad, so was the guy I shot.”
Win thought about that. “We don’t know enough yet. Let’s contact Zorra and see what she can find out.”
We heard exertion and scraping and pounding from below. Then a voice called up, “Got it!”
We looked down. The flashlight showed two sets of hands pulling up on the lid. The men grunted from the effort. The casket looked regulation size. That surprised me. I had expected something smaller for a seven-year-old girl. But maybe that was the point, right? Maybe that was what was saving me from feeling overly ghoulish—I didn’t think we would find a seven-year-old’s skeleton.
I really didn’t want to watch anymore so I stepped away. I was here just to observe, to make sure they actually took a sample from the grave. This was crazy enough without knowing that everything involving this test was rock solid. If it came back negative, I didn’t want anyone saying, “But how do you know it was from the right grave?” or “Maybe they just said they dug but didn’t.” I wanted to eliminate as many variables as possible.
“Got the casket opened,” one of the diggers called up.
I saw Win look down. Another voice floated up from the hole in a whisper. “Sweet Jesus.”
Then silence.
“What?” I asked.
“A skeleton,” Win said, still peering down. “Small. Probably a child’s.”
Everyone just stood there frozen.
“Get a sample,” Win said.
One of the diggers said, “What kind of sample?”
“A bone. Some fabric if you find any. Seal it in those plastic bags.”
A child was buried here. I guess that I really didn’t expect that. I looked at Win. “Could we be all wrong about this?”
Win shrugged. “DNA doesn’t lie.”
“So if it’s not Miriam Collins, whose skeleton is that?”
“There are,” Win said, “other possibilities.”
“Such as?”
“I had one of my people do a little investigating. Around the time of the car accident, a little girl from Brentwood went missing. People were sure the father did it, but no body was ever found. The father remains free to this day.”
I thought about what Win had said before. “You’re right. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
Win said nothing.
I looked back down into the hole. A dirty face from below handed up the plastic bag. “All yours, mate. Good luck to ya and go to hell.”
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