“The only intelligence professional I care about is you. I just took this job so they could help me find ya, and they’re keepin’ up their end so far, so I’ve got to keep up mine, don’t I?”
“What’s your plan with me, then?” Court asked, genuinely confused.
“I knew you and Hanley had worked together. In Russia, was it? I knew goin’ to him would get me closer to you, and I didn’t want to chase you around the bloody planet. I would if I had to, yeah, but I didn’t want to.”
“So?”
“So…I want ya to come to me. I’m gonna convince you to do that.”
“I’ve got other things to do at the moment.”
“Yeah, you’ve got to figure out who this bloody cabal is in your government, chief. Thems that want to put an end to the American way, whatever the feck that is.”
“Seems like a worthy pursuit on my part.”
“And what I’m doin’ is worthy, as well.”
“Just what is it you are doin’?”
“I’ve come here to America to kill you, mate, for somethin’ you’ve done.”
“Is this the point of the conversation where you tell me what that is?”
The Irishman breathed hard into the phone, then said, “Varna, Bulgaria.”
Court let out a long and slow sigh, but he was careful to keep it silent. No, this was not just some horrible misunderstanding. He’d been in Varna a couple of months earlier. He’d done things there. He’d killed people there.
Shit.
He kept his tone even. “Never heard of it.”
“You was there. People put you there, then they put you in Russia. Hanley, from what I’ve been told. I don’t care about Russia, I don’t care about Hanley, but I care about bleedin’ Bulgaria, because there’s where you killed me son.”
Shit,Court thought again. He stared at the ceiling, his feet on the desk.
“Sasho Minchev,” the Irishman said. “You remember the night.”
Confused, Court said, “Your son was Sasho—”
“Of course he wasn’t Sasho Minchev!” the man snapped. “Do I sound like I’m from the feckin’ Balkans?”
“Not really, no.”
“You killed and maimed other men that night. One of the dead was my boy.”
Court thought back to the night, some two and a half months earlier. A lot had happened since then. Many other violent encounters, other threats, other dangers, other bodies.
Varna. A hotel, a nightclub, an alleyway. He’d injured a man in the alley, another in a parking garage. He was pretty certain he’d killed a man on a stairway, then shot another in a hall.
And then, in a hotel suite, he’d wounded a guard, and then he’d killed the Bulgarian crime boss, Sasho Minchev.
He tried to picture the faces of the fallen, but he could not.
All this thinking took a long moment, and the man on the other end of the line finally interrupted.
“You remember now?”
“I…I don’t know.”
