Black Scorpion (25 page)

The bartender shook his head slowly, beads of sweat starting to dapple his brow and cheeks. “It's
h
too late. You have no idea what thes
h
e people are like, how far they'll go. They'll kill
you
and feed your s
h
kin to their dogs
h
.”

Alexander took a larger step forward, sharing the light now with the bartender, making sure the man met his icy, unblinking stare. “Look into my eyes, Andrei, and tell me if you think anyone will be feeding my skin to their dogs.” He stepped back again, making sure Andrei could see that he held the electrical cord, and the man's life, in his grasp. “Now, one more time, where is the young woman?”

“Clos
h
e by.”

“Where?”

Andrei took as deep a breath as he could manage.

“Where?”

Andrei began to speak again.

 

FIFTY-SIX

H
OIA-
B
ACIU
F
OREST,
R
OMANIA

Dracu entered another code into the keypad set before the entrance to a suite of rooms in the fortress reserved for the man most vital to his coming plans. Niels Taupmann, the German genius Dracu called “Professor,” was under video surveillance within these walls and anywhere else in the fortress. No real concern he'd try to escape and he wasn't exactly a prisoner per se, except of his own mind and the eccentricities that had helped him survive his years in a Russian gulag when he refused to give that government what he was giving to Black Scorpion.

Because Dracu had asked him nothing, said please, gave him a choice as well as a purpose. Sometimes things really were that simple, especially to a man who despised modern Russia as much as he did the communist regime of the old Soviet Union above all else. Taupmann's father, also a scientist, had traveled there during the Cold War from East Germany and died in a freakish accident that was never fully explained. When his mother insisted on investigating, she disappeared too, around Moscow. Taupmann was a young man then, a boy really, and was forced to fend for himself as a result. He lived in a communist-backed orphanage for similarly displaced youngsters while devoting himself passionately to his studies. He evolved into one of the greatest minds of his time, at the forefront of building the stratagems meant to secure the original information superhighway. His focus then and in later years was to develop the means to best safeguard the transmission of data across cyberspace.

So nothing could have pleased him more than to be invited to participate in a 2008 Moscow symposium at which he and other scientists would expound on their theories on the future of information technology. Taupmman arrived in Moscow on schedule and was met by a reception committee of prominent officials most interested in his work.

“We would like to retain your services,” the leader, a man wearing the uniform of a general, told him.

“I'm not interested.”

“We are willing to make you a very wealthy man in return for your cooperation.”

“I'm still not interested.”

The three men exchanged glances. “What can we do to attract your interest, Professor?” asked another one of them.

“You know what you can do? Go to hell.”

Two nights later, Taupmann went to sleep in his hotel only to wake up in a windowless room facing a pair of big, menacing guards. Then the original trio of men entered the room and the guards left.

“You will provide us with the information we want,” the general said.

“No, I won't.”

“You will. You just don't know it yet.”

“Who are you? Why do you do this to me?”

The speaker had smiled. “We are either your best friends or worst enemies. The choice is yours. You either can resume your life, Professor, or you have no life.”

“I'm an important man,” Taupmann insisted indignantly. “I can't just disappear. People will look for me, people will come for me.”

The general looked him in the eye, smiling again. “This is Russia, Professor. Nobody finds anything here we don't want found.”

When Taupmann still refused to talk, he was transferred to a military prison, not to be released until such time that he cooperated. His continued silence led to Taupmann's transfer to the gulag from which Black Scorpion had liberated him after he'd been forgotten there and left to rot. And the old man had embraced the opportunity he believed Dracu was providing to achieve something he wanted more than anything in the world: The destruction of Russia.

The door opened with a click, allowing the noxious scent of marijuana to flood the hall in a haze of smoke. Dracu entered the sprawling confines of what Professor Niels Taupmann referred to as his workshop, but looked more like an art studio. Original paintings of all sizes, exclusively landscapes, filled out the walls while canvases in various stages of development sat on easels scattered along the spacious floor. Dracu knew there was some sense to the placement, some balance, but he didn't dare ask what, reluctant to do anything that might upset the even more delicate balance that defined the old man's mind. The art studio, workshop, or whatever it was reeked even more pungently of the pot stench.

The landscapes were wondrously realistic, looking not so much like art as windows offering various views of the world as the old man must've imagined it to be.

“You should try it,” Taupmann said to him, without looking up from the canvas he was working on. “Creating beauty soothes the soul. The world can never have too much beauty.”

“No, Professor, it can't.”

“So grab a brush and join me. The world needs all the light it can get.”

“I'm not much good at art … or light.”

Taumpann chided him with his eyes. “A man with your vision? You are a great artist, my friend, on a different canvas of your own choosing.” The old man held up a brush. “Why not let me teach you the basics? I used to be a teacher, you know; at least, I think I was.”

“You were,” Dracu confirmed. “And a very good one, until the Russians made you their prisoner.”

Taupmann's expression tightened, seeming to forget all about the paintbrush he was holding. “Did my students miss me?”

“I'm sure they did.”

His expression began to darken, progressing through various shades he'd used in any number of paintings to craft the sky at sunset. “I hate Russia.”

“I know.”

“Ugly country.”

Taupmann laid his paintbrush down and stepped out from behind the canvas, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his bathrobe worn over a pair of pajamas. Dracu couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the professor dressed in anything else.

The old man stopped at a long table cluttered with any number of jerry-rigged inventions he'd concocted either on his own or on Dracu's coaxing. Several of these were identical Bose clock radios common to high-end luxury hotels and resorts, a facsimile of which had already provided another centerpiece of Black Scorpion's plan. Taupmann lifted a marijuana blunt rolled in a flavored cigar wrapper from the sill of an ashtray. He touched a lighter to its end and inhaled deeply, the odor of grape-scented weed swallowing the harsh scent of oil paint that would've otherwise dominated the room.

Taupmann coughed out a thick curtain of smoke that seemed to hang in the air. “If you haven't come to paint, what have you come for?”

“I just wanted to check in on you. See how your final set of calculations and estimates were coming.”

The old man smoothed one side of the wild hair growing like weeds from his scalp down, leaving the other to skew in all directions. “Wonderfully. Everything checks out. We're ready. Just one problem, though. A big one.”

“What is it?” Dracu asked, feeling the annoying tug of trepidation.

Taupmann shook a nearly empty plastic bag down to pot stems and seeds. “My supply is drained. Need more, need much, much more!”

To help blur the truth behind the professor's presence here, Dracu had also come to offer something that quickly became as important to Taupmann as his paintings and desire for vengeance against Russia:

Marijuana.

“I'll have it sent up immediately,” he promised.

“Good, good, good! Helps me think, keeps the ghosts away. You believe in ghosts?”

“I've never seen one. But I believe in plenty I've never seen.”

“They're real, all fellow residents of the gulag. I watched so many die. They went, others came, then they died, too. Vicious cycle, vicious!”

“I understand.”

“My parents stop by sometimes, too. We watch television together,” Taupmann said, pointing toward a big widescreen mounted on the wall. He lifted the blunt back to his mouth and sucked in another deep drag. “Join me?” he said, offering it to Dracu.

“Not today.”

“Come, then, I have something to show you.”

Taupmann took the ashtray in hand and led Dracu to a beautifully drawn painting of Russia, complete with literally thousands of tiny, pin-size dots marring the landscape, often in large clusters.

“What do you think? The red is for our primary targets. Blue represents the more outlying, secondary ones. Green represents the densest areas of population, yellow the next level, and white the sparsest. The red and green pins are in perfect combination. Looks like Christmas.”

“Yes,” Dracu agreed, “it does indeed. I'm counting on you, Professor. I've waited a very long time for this.”

“So have I,” Taupmann said, through the haze of smoke that had settled between them. “But we must take care, my friend, because almost invariably it's in the eleventh hour when failure occurs, always unexpected and always preventable had all appropriate measures been taken.” He shook his nearly empty plastic bag. “That's why you'd best replenish my supply.”

*   *   *

Dracu found a subordinate waiting for him outside the professor's suite of rooms, along with Armura.

“We're ready to pick up the woman in Bun
ă
Ziua.”

“I'm glad you waited, because I've decided to join you,” Dracu said, recalling Niels Taupmann's cautionary words. “Add some additional vehicles and men. And make sure the
Securitate
station is secure.”

“Is there a problem,
domnule
?”

“No, just a feeling.”

 

FIFTY-SEVEN

B
UN
Ă
Z
IUA,
R
OMANIA

Michael and Alexander sat in the darkness of their Alfa Romeo down the street from the wrought-iron fence that enclosed an old building lifted from another century. Very likely some member of the Romanian ruling party, and royal family before him, had resided here at one point. It was an architectural masterpiece, several centuries old at the very least, but beautifully maintained thanks in large part to the detail that went into its construction with wood and glass that were the best of their time. The roof came to a single peak ridden by a weather vane. Steel grating covered the windows and the Romanian flag hung over the front door. The exterior was finished in burnished concrete, polished to be completely smooth.

“You believe the bartender?” Michael asked, referring to the man they'd left bound and gagged back in the basement of the bar.

“Yes,” Alexander told him, “because he was scared. More of who's inside that building than us.”

“He called them the
Securitate
.”

“The predecessor for today's SRI for
Serviciul Român de Informaţii
.”

“You're talking about the old Romanian secret police,” Michael said, realizing.

He knew that the
Securitate
had been dismantled after the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in the end of the Cold War, leading to the purported demise of Soviet-style secret police organizations. In Romania, this process was further expedited by the overthrow of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled the country with an iron fist defined by the now defunct
Securitate
.

At least thought to be defunct.

Like its sister organization in Russia, the KGB, though, the members of the
Securitate
never really went away. Instead, they remained still and quiet and sought positions in the rebranded
Serviciul Român de Informaţii
, or SRI, from which they could reclaim the power they believed to be rightfully theirs. And, like Black Scorpion, the revamped
Securitate
knew well enough to remain in the shadows, leaving their ever-increasing measure of control over the country to the subject of innuendo and conspiracy theorists.

Alexander's silence affirmed Michael's conclusion. “This isn't going to be easy.”

Michael returned his gaze to the building, picturing Scarlett Swan as a prisoner inside.

“Where do you think they're keeping her?” he asked Alexander.

“The basement would be my first thought, but I noticed staining in the concrete of the foundation.”

“Staining?”

Alexander lowered the tiny set of powerful binoculars with night-vision capabilities from his eyes. They'd chosen this spot because a garbage truck parked on an awkward angle perhaps fifty feet before them precluded clear view of their car from the SRI building.

“Indicates flooding, very common in this region,” Alexander explained, handing Michael the binoculars. “My guess is it rendered the basement unusable long ago. If it were me, I'd place her on the top floor in the room furthest from the street, looking out over the back.”

“So no one would be able to hear her screams.” Michael felt his heart skip a beat, as he lowered the binoculars and handed them back.

“You saved this woman once, Michael,” said Alexander. “You can do it again.”