Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (11 page)

The apparition waited a moment, then followed him.

Lyon, France

Detective-Inspector
Aurélie Rideau had just finished texting her wife.  Their anniversary was next weekend, and Rideau was reminding her not to let her forget.

Patricia
texted her back:
What happens if I forget to remind you?  ;)

Rideau
smiled:
Then we’re both out of luck!

Stepping out the back of
the black sedan, Rideau nodded a cursory thank-you to Sylvie, her driver and personal guard for the trip from the airport.  She barely looked up from her phone before walking through the revolving door.  The streets of Lyon were choked with tourists this time of year, mostly Americans, Canadians and Chinese.  You could spot them on the sidewalk just by their dumb expressions.  They crawled along quai Charles de Gaulle like happily lost zombies.

Patricia texted
her again.  Rideau checked it:
Always putting the burden on me!

Rideau
scoffed.  Her wife always played pouty.  That was part of her charm.  As per their ritual, Rideau texted back:
Why not?  You’re never doing anything constructive
.

That’ll get her goat
.  Rideau smiled to herself when she hit
SEND
and turned her phone off.  She couldn’t be interrupted by personal calls; she had to go to work, if the message she received from Mitchell was accurate.  She had a different phone for work, and she left that one on when she stepped inside the Interpol main offices.  She and Sylvie both had to present their ID badges at the front desk, and were only permitted to pass the lobby and go near the elevators after raking the same badge over a scanner and running their thumbprints over another scanner.

“
Bonjour, Inspecteur
,” said the British security guard at the front desk, practicing her French.  “
Huitéme étage?
”

“
Good morning, Katrina,” Rideau returned, practicing her English.  “Yes, up on eight.  Hey, you had the root canal, right?  How’d that go?”

“Not as bad as I thought, ma’am.  Thank you for asking.”

Rideau checked her e-mail on her work iPhone, as she habitually did every ten minutes.  Then she zipped over to BBC News and CNN’s website to see what was being said about the subway bombing at St. Paul’s.  So far, the death toll remained the same number; two people were killed, and four were injured. 
That’ll probably be shuffled over to Oskar Wahlström’s department before the day’s out
, she thought.

She stepped into an elevator, and
stepped out onto a bustling eighth floor of the Interpol HQ building.  A sea of cubicles and kiosks greeted her; fax machines, personal computers, and various printers were dishing out the latest criminal activity coming from a range of news services around the world.  Many nuggets of information were being sent via secure fax to countless embassies across the planet.  At least two people shared a cubicle, each unit a small team that worked closely to sift through photos of known terrorists, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and fraud artists to create profiles and lists of places they may currently be.  All was being compiled to form accurate profiles and spread those out across the globe.

Rideau navigated her way past the people who were making phone calls, setting up videoconferences, and assisting law enforcement representatives in other countries with complex
skip-tracing.  Many were leaning back in their chairs, speaking into their Bluetooths and monitoring various video feeds, eating potato chips, and guzzling coffee and sodas.  These people were the ones who made it happen.  They were the blood of Interpol.  They were what Interpol had been originally created for: communication.

Sylvie,
her security guard, stepped out of the elevator with her and vanished from her side, likely to be retasked to another detail.

Rideau passed Vincent Marcello, who smiled and waved at her
briefly, but continued spinning slowly in his chair while he communicated with someone across the world.  “Yes, Director.  Yes, you have that much correct.  But the woman that you’re after is a con artist who’s fled to her home country.  She lives in North Korea, and they haven’t been very uncooperative lately answering our questions—”

Rideau tapped Claudine
Noëll
e
on her shoulder as she walked by.  Noëll
e
was standing up in her cubicle and stretching, her dress jacket flung on the floor beside her desk.  “
Les numéros de compte ne sont pas assorti, monsieur
,” she was saying into her mini-headset.  “
Je suis très désolé
.”  When she felt Rideau’s gentle touch, she whispered “Hello” to her before going back to her conversation.  “
Nous devrons regarder ailleurs
—”

She had her own corner office tucked away in the east wing of the building, and it was one that usually had a beautiful view of a number of Lyon’s greater architectural achievements, but Rideau
often kept the shades drawn over the Plexiglas windows.  When she entered, she shut the door behind her and the room’s extra-thick walnut-paneled walls and soundproofing technology allowed it to diminish all the noise from the floor outside to a barely audible murmur.

Rideau set her briefcase on top of the table and took her jacket off.  She looked at her watch.  Still on time.  The others would probably be waiting already.  She established the link thr
ough Interpol’s protected servers, and within seconds the faces popped onto her screen.  Her screen was cut into four sections.  Only two of them were currently filled with video.  The top left window was filled with her old friend Mitchell Hamis, a handler for the operative on the other screen directly to his right, Corvas Desh.  The two of them were sitting side by side in one of the rooms of the safe house the IB and the CBI (India’s own Central Bureau of Investigation) had allowed them to work out of.

“Gentlemen,” she said.  “How are we?”

“Fine,” said Mitchell.  “You look lovely as ever.”

Rideau smiled politely. 
“
Merci
,” she said.  Mitchell was ever the gentleman, and Rideau was not above flattery.  She would take it wherever she could get it, because her cruel aunt and a deranged grandfather had raised her, making certain she knew she was homely.  But sometimes the very cruel and the very deranged were the only honest people.

“Is Gregori there?” asked Desh.

“Not yet.  But I’m expecting him…
ah
!”  The door opened, and in stepped Gregori Matveyev, the six-foot-five-Russian with round and massive shoulders, head bald as a bowling ball and a severe face etched in stone.  “Good morning, Comrade Matveyev.  How are we this morning?”

“Not terribly bad.”

“Is the French cuisine agreeing with you any more today than it was last week?”  Metveyev had had a terrible bout of food poisoning the week before, and had seen it as a sign he should never have left the Motherland, and lamented his decision to come live with the “soft” Frenchies for the next five years.  A man accustomed to grouse, but all in all Rideau was happy with the Director’s decision to bring him on.

The Russian ambassador and liaison with the FSB
(Federal Security Bureau) gave her a dry look embedded in a wry smile.  “Let’s not talk of these things.  What have you heard?”

Rideau smirked, and turned the computer around so that Metveyev could see Mitchell and Desh, and so they could see him.  “We’re both here,
boys.  Go ahead and tell the ambassador what you told me.”

Mitchell spoke first, cleared his throat.  “We came into some information, uh, some video footage we’d been sent by an anonymous source on the inside of the trade.  The port authorities at Sadarghat Port weren’t even aware of the transaction happening.  No one was supposed to be on those docks at that time of night.”

“You’re sure it was them?” asked Metveyev.  Rideau watched him reach into his coat pocket, pull out a mint, unwrapped it and tossed it into his mouth.  “We have to be sure this time, before we make fools out of ourselves again.”

“It’s them,” said Mitchell.  “Facial-recognition software positively ID’d this man.”  He
held up a printout with a picture of a thick-faced man, with a square Russian jaw, icy-blue eyes, a hard stare, and perfectly manicured blonde hair.

“
Yuri Shcherbakov,” Rideau said.  “I think you’re familiar with this man from the—”

“The Dutch revenge killings,
da
,” he said flatly.  “Russian Mafia.  They call him the Grey Wolf.”

“That’s correct.”  Rideau watched Metveyev for any sign of surprise.  It was said it was difficult to get an emotional response out of a Russian, to get their eyes
to widen or their eyebrows to rise, but even still, she’d figured mentioning Shcherbakov’s name would provoke more than a flat statement.

The Dutch revenge killings had been a dark time in FSB investigations.  The Russian secret service agency had done all they could do to keep a media blackout concerning those gruesome crime scenes, and most of them had been spun to the press as nothing more than random acts of violence.  But a popular journalist duo in Amsterdam had done a great deal of digging, and had done their jobs so well that they had uncovered a few ways that the notorious Dutch syndicates were getting women out of the ports at night, selling them to their allies in Russian circles.

The Russian Mafia, like so many other syndicates, did not like interference from outside sources.  They had tried bribing the two journalists in Amsterdam, but it hadn’t worked.  And the journalists only became more curious about the Dutch-Russian connection when they got wind of key witnesses against the human trafficking rings that began dying in grisly scenes, and they began to hear rumors of a man called the Grey Wolf.

The first to die was Jacobus van den Broek, a member of the Dut
ch organized crime gang Skalla in Amsterdam.  He was the first major arrest that Interpol helped to arrange with the Amsterdam Police Department.  Two days before he was set to give testimony in court, van den Broek was found naked and bound on his living room floor, a fire poker that had been red-hot when it entered his anus was shoved completely inside, to its very handle.  Autopsy and analysis of the crime scene indicated he was alive when this took place.

Then there was Aldo Daalder, owner of a modest wine company that was willing to testify that he and his family had been threatened unless they agreed to allow the
Mafia use some of their shipping containers to move young girls back and forth between countries where the wine company did business.  Daalder was left barely alive in a corner of his basement, tied to a chair by razor wire, where he’d nearly cut himself in half trying to reach his two daughters, four and six, who had been seated at a table across from one another and forced to play a game of Russian roulette.  When the older sister had blown the younger’s brains out, someone had split the older sister’s head in half with an ax.  Daalder died later of his injuries.

And there was
Willeke Ommen, an avid dog trainer, who told Dutch police that her two sons had gotten mixed up in the business of the
vory v zakone
, and had become their proxy men in Amsterdam.  Ms. Ommen went missing for several days before anyone went to check on her.  Her dogs lay in pieces all about the house.  Ms. Ommen herself was found in her bedroom, her stomach split open and her severed head shoved into the middle for no discernible reason.  Her two sons were found floating in a lake a week later—the theory was, they hadn’t taken too kindly to their mother being so brutally punished, and someone had shown them what happened when their opinion differed from the Mafia’s.

These killings
and more happened over a one-year period, from Moscow to Amsterdam, and a few towns far outside that range that would later be connected.  This had all come out about two years ago, and had underscored the growing problems with organized crime internationally, the same problems that Interpol had been discussing for more than a decade now.  The Internet, as well as faster modes of travel, had allowed for organized criminal syndicates, terrorists, and even teams of heist experts to communicate, compare data and techniques, cooperate, and generally train one another.  An endless series of back scratching going on around the globe, and everyone from the FBI to the CIA to the G-2 to the FSB to Mossad were racing to catch up.

This also underscored the increasing need for the International Criminal Police Organization.  Interpol was created for one reason: enha
ncing communication between the multitude of police agencies in nearly two hundred separate countries.

As it turned out,
the Amsterdam reporters had done their jobs too well, and had closed in on a few ex-Mafia guys that claimed to have met the Grey Wolf.  They’d gone to meet with these informants, and neither one of them were ever seen again.  Interpol had gotten the tip that the journalists were about to be executed, but hadn’t been able to do anything in time.  It was one of Rideau’s great regrets, for she had been attached to that investigation, and even collaborated with the two journalists. 
Heesters and Steege, may you rest in peace
, she thought.