Evil Deeds (Bob Danforth 1) (50 page)

Jack slowly drove up the road, his mind still in turmoil. He remembered Bob telling him the story years ago of Michael’s kidnapping. The way Bob had spoken the name Stefan Radko then, the hatred in his voice, had imprinted the Radko name in Jack’s memory. Should I tell Mike about Radko? Jesus, Jack thought, Bob and Liz must have had a reason to keep the facts from the boy. And now Michael had fallen in love with Radko’s daughter.

“Why don’t we check over there?” Michael said, bringing Jack back to the present. He saw Michael pointing in the direction of a campsite near the road. Jack steered the Jeep over to it. The shapeless mounds on the ground around the dying fire turned out to be blanket-covered refugees. One man still sat up, smoking a cigarette. In answer to Jack’s questions, he told them in broken English that he had not seen any old Gypsy wandering around during the last few hours.

“Mike, this is the proverbial needle in a haystack,” Jack said, pulling the vehicle back on the road.

“Yeah, I know. But let’s go on for another mile or two.”

They followed the meandering road north, stopping at fires along the way to ask about Stefan; but no one claimed to have seen him. They were about to give it up when Michael pointed to one more small fire on a hillside off to the right. “Someone’s up in those trees,” he said.

Jack stopped the Jeep and walked with Michael up the hillside toward the fire. A man started down the hill toward them, silhouetted against the light from the fire. Something about the way the man carried himself alarmed Jack. Erect, confident, the man moved almost cat-like toward them.

Jack dropped behind Michael, slipped his hand under his jacket, and released the safety on his pistol. Then he moved again to Michael’s left side and walked next to him.

The man approaching them said something in what sounded like Serbo-Croatian.

“Do you speak English?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” the man said.

“We’re looking for an old man named Stefan Radko. He wandered off from the refugee camp near Kumanovo. Have you seen him?”

“We have seen many old men, but none have told us their names,” the man said. “What does this Radko look like?”

Michael noticed the man spoke English in a stilted, very formal way – as though he’d had language training, but no real practice in an English-speaking country.

“About my height,” Michael said. “Maybe a little lighter than me. White hair. Dark skin. Large mustache.”

“If we meet him, we’ll tell him you’re searching for him,” the man said.

Jack and Michael returned to the Jeep. When Jack turned the vehicle around, he noticed the man still stood where they’d left him.

“Who were they, Dimitrov?” Sokic demanded.

“Some American officer and a civilian – probably one of the relief workers. They were looking for this piece-of-shit Gypsy,” he said, kicking dirt on the prostrate Stefan.

Sokic rubbed his chin, walked in a circle around the fire. “Did you see the officer’s name on his field jacket?”

“No sir, it was too dark.”

“All right, get some sleep. We leave in a couple of hours. I want to find Danforth before it gets light. This old Gypsy is going to make our job much easier.”

“You seemed tense back there,” Michael said. “Something wrong?”

“Oh, probably just paranoia. Did you notice anything about that guy?”

Michael tilted his head to one side. “Well, now that you mention it, he seemed cocky for a refugee, you know, confident, not scared like the others I’ve seen. Not at all nervous about our showing up this late at night.”

“Uh-huh. Anything else?”

“I don’t know, but I felt like the guy lied about not seeing Mr. Radko.”

“That’s what I thought, too. You should come back in the morning with one of your platoons and check him out again.”

“It’s a long drive back to the base, then to Kumanovo,” Michael said. “Why don’t you spend the night at the base? It’s too late to drive me back, then go to your hotel in Kumanovo. My roommate’s out in the field, so you can use his bunk.”

“I’ll take you up on that, Mike. I don’t think I could stay awake driving back to Kumanovo by myself.”

As they approached the gate to the 82nd’s base camp, Michael said, “I wonder what happened to Mr. Radko.”

Jack cringed.