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One he had no desire to repeat.
It was time to get his mind back on why he’d come to Bruges. He had a budget for the purchase of the three books, which should be more than enough. Their resale would entail at least a 25 percent markup, not a bad return on a few days’ work. He should be able to make the buys and be back in Copenhagen by tomorrow afternoon. He’d taken the train so his return could be flexible, but he definitely needed to be home by Friday. Cassiopeia was due in Denmark that evening for a few days.
Which he was looking forward to.
A crowd had gathered around the statues of Jan Breydel and Pieter de Coninck. A butcher and weaver, two Flemish revolutionaries who led a 14th-century uprising against the French. He doubted any of the gawkers knew their historical significance. Bars and restaurants dominated the square’s perimeter, everything alive with hustle and bustle. He rounded the statues and was about to turn for the side street that led to his hotel when he caught sight of a woman, her long legs, lean figure, and blond hair distinctive. She wore jeans with boots and a silk blouse, and was moving away from a row of flagpoles toward another of the streets radiating from the square.
Sonia Draga.
She’d intentionally revealed herself back at the restaurant. Surely seeing him with Bunch and Stephanie had raised suspicions. Why wouldn’t it? But there’d been no opportunity for him to explain. Maybe now was the chance. He kept watching as she dissolved into the crowd. Then something else caught his attention. Two familiar faces. Two-thirds of the Three Amigos. Following Sonia.
Leave it alone.
Walk away.
Yeah, right.
He headed in her direction.
At the junction of the side street and the market square he caught sight of Sonia fifty yards ahead, the Two Amigos in pursuit. Buildings lined both sides, and there were enough people moving back and forth for no one to be noticed. But Sonia had to know she had company, as these guys weren’t making any secret about their presence.
She turned and disappeared into one of the buildings.
The Two Amigos followed.
Nothing about this seemed right, but he kept going until he came to a pedimented arch that led through one of the gabled houses, forming an alley about fifty feet long. No one was in sight. He walked through the covered passage into a courtyard flanked by more old houses. Wrought-iron lanterns suspended from the stone façades cast a dim glow. Another covered passage led out on the opposite side. Three doors dotted the exterior walls to his left and right, all closed. Where’d everybody go? He heard a click and turned to see the Two Amigos standing behind him, one of them armed with a gun.
“That way,” the guy said, motioning with the weapon at one of the closed doors.
No choice.
He turned.
The door opened and Sonia emerged.
She walked by him and gently stroked his cheek with her hand.
“Sorry, Cotton. It had to be done.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Czajkowski realized that he could not sit back and allow things to happen. His whole life was at stake. Perhaps even the entire country’s future. Someone named Jonty Olivier was out to destroy him. He’d long expected threats from the various political parties, hostile ministers in Parliament, opposition leaders, even the media—which was not always kind—but never had he thought a foreigner would become so dangerous.
It had been a long time since he’d thought of that day at Mokotów Prison. Many times he’d wondered what had happened to the math professor tied to the stool. The last he saw the man had been forced to crawl on hands and knees from the interrogation room back to his cell. How degrading. He’d been so young then. So afraid. Major Dilecki of the SB had brought him there to make a point.
Do as he was told or face the same consequences.
Countless people had been arrested and tortured. In addition to beatings and burnings, the most popular methods of “interrogation” had been to rip off fingernails, apply temple screws, clamp on tight handcuffs that caused the skin to burst and blood to flow, force prisoners to run up and down stairs, deprive them of sleep, make them stand at attention for hours, reduce their rations, pour buckets of cold water into cells, leave them in solitary confinement, anything and everything imaginable to break a person down. All of it had been applied in a harsh, premeditated manner, without remorse or discrimination. Those who fainted were revived with an adrenaline shot. Before some of the sessions, which could last for hours, many received booster injections to keep them alert. Torturers strictly followed the wishes of interrogating officers like Dilecki.
A damn disgrace.
And for what?
That brave man on the floor that day had been right. What the foreign force has taken from us, we shall with sabre retrieve. And that was precisely what had happened. The communists were finally driven away and Poland returned to its people.
But at what cost?
During martial law many had stayed in prison for years, until a general amnesty finally forgave everyone. Till today, he never knew what happened to Dilecki, but apparently the major had kept up with him, secreting documents that should have long ago been destroyed.
One day you might be a big somebody.
What a bastard.
Mokotów Prison still existed, now used by the government as a short-term holding facility. No one, though, had been abused there in a long time. A huge plaque now adorned one of the outer walls commemorating the victims. What happened inside those concrete cells, in unimaginable conditions, had been the subject of books and memoirs. Nobody really knew how many died there, and few paid for those atrocities. Unfortunately, justice back then seemed more like a leaf in the spring air, at the mercy of the twists from an unpredictable wind. Now here he was, decades later, still dealing with it.
How had things come to this?
He was fifty-six years old, a respected citizen of Poland, one who’d managed to attain the highest elected office in the land. His mother had wanted him to become a priest, because back then the clearest path to an education came from the church. All children were taught in school to be subservient to the state and obedient workers to the collective. No mention of individuality ever came. People were helpless in directing their own lives. But he managed to obtain a university degree, eventually heading up, during the time of martial law, a branch of the Independent Students’ Union, the junior arm of Solidarity. That position had been what caught Dilecki’s attention, along with his operation of an underground publishing house. He’d been quite the radical. But everyone was back then. The country was changing. The world was changing. And he’d wanted to be part of that change.
He went on to serve in all aspects of government. First elected to Parliament when he was thirty, he served four terms before moving to the executive branch. He’d been an undersecretary of state, the vice minister of national defense, the general secretary of two political parties, then back to Parliament where he rose to vice speaker. He came from a solid, respected family with not a hint of scandal or shame. His grandfather fought with valor in the Polish–Soviet War, his father in World War II.
The Catholic Church meant everything to him.
He remembered vividly the night in May 1981 when word came that John Paul II had been shot. Their beloved favorite son lay fighting for his life. Czajkowski had been on his way to a Solidarity meeting. Instead, he’d wandered into a church where hundreds of people knelt in prayer and a priest said mass. Above the altar hung a dark painting of the crucifixion. He recalled thinking that once again Poles faced a calamity. The life of their pope was in peril. Their economy in shambles. Russian tanks were massing at the border. The country seemed on the rack. Yet before him was the strangely calming image of a man splayed by crucifixion. Not only a symbol of the nation’s turmoil but a promise of redemption, too. He recalled what someone once wrote. Poland is the Jesus Christ of nations.
How true.
And how ironic that the passions of Christ could n
ow be part of his own undoing. He felt like he was about to be crucified, too.
Everyone had been so young back then. The head of the largest Solidarity branch in Warsaw a mere twenty-five. The leader of the Gdansk Shipyard union barely twenty-one. Most of the high officers in Solidarity were all in their late twenties and early thirties. Lech Walesa at the helm had been the old man at thirty-seven. It had been young men and women who’d fought the battle against communism. Youth definitely came with fire and fury, but it also came with bad judgment and inexperience. No one had known where it all was going, or how it would end. Solidarity seemed many times as lost as the nation. The government-controlled media blamed the union for everything, including food shortages. Hearing it so often, people began to believe the lies.
A slogan resonated across the nation.
The government takes care of laws, the party takes care of politics, and Solidarity takes care of the people.
But many times he’d wondered if that was true.
Few had been able to articulate what the nation wanted. But everyone knew what they didn’t want.
A distant, arbitrary, central authority full of repression.
Decades of mismanagement and corruption finally caught up with the communists. The Red Bourgeoisie benefited, while everyone else paid the price. The fools overborrowed and overspent, in the end having only enough money left to service the interest on billions in foreign debt. Eventually the economy crumbled, consumer goods vanished, and food went scarce, which allowed a wave of angry young people to mobilize, ten million strong, and bring a government to its knees.
He’d been part of that revolution.
Now he was the head of state.
But for how much longer.
Socialist? Anti-socialist?
It was a question asked many times in the 1980s, but one that disappeared in the 1990s and now no longer mattered.
Poland was free.
Or was it?
The pain in his chest felt like his heart was encased in barbed wire. Not a coronary. Just the past rearing its ugly head and reminding him that it still existed. He had to fix this.
This had to end.
And whatever was required to make that happen—
He would do.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cotton was led into the building and up a flight of stairs to a second-floor apartment full of nondescript furniture, the kind bought by cheap landlords who expect the worst from tenants. He caught a strong smell of mustiness and wondered if anyone lived there. A familiar face waited inside, one that ushered him in with a casual sweep of a big paw.
“Mr. Malone. Good see you again.”
