AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The first stop was at a warehouse belonging to Simon Lazovic. Lazovic had been trying to elbow his way into Janic’s business for years, swiftly becoming one of Janic’s biggest rivals, making him the perfect patsy for Vesna’s plan.
Six months earlier, Lazovic’s people had stolen a weapons shipment off a train in nearby Serbia. Though the crime was officially unsolved, everyone knew who was responsible. Which meant if the pilfered weapons wereused—for instance—in an attack on an enemy’s stronghold where a family of innocent civilians just happened to be detained, blame would fall at Lazovic’s doorstep. If Vesna was really lucky, it might even start a war between the rival organizations.
Vesna had learned from a contact that the weapons were being held at this particular warehouse, and that the building was guarded by half a dozen men. Two guards walked the perimeter, while the rest were stationed inside, on the ground floor.
After observing the pair outside for twenty minutes, Vesna noted two things. The first was that the guards patrolled in a pattern that left a four-minute gap in coverage at the warehouse’s back corner. Second, near that corner on the third floor was a broken window. Though most of the glass was still intact, there was a section missing that looked large enough to reach through.
When the guards disappeared from sight again, she and the three men she’d brought with her used several pipes that ran up the side of the building to climb to the window. Vesna stuck her hand through the break and found the window’s latch. The window swung open a bit nosier than she would have liked, so as soon as she and her men scrambled inside, they pressed against the wall, waiting for someone to show up.
When no one did, they found a stairwell and headeddown. The room they wanted was in the basement, which meant passing the ground floor where Lazovic’s other men were.
After signaling her colleagues to wait, Vesna eased down the final flight of stairs to the first-floor landing. She listened at the door, then slipped a microcamera through the space at the bottom. The wireless camera was attached to a rod that she used to move it.
She watched the feed on her phone and saw that the corridor outside ran parallel to the door. She aimed the camera left, spotted no one, and then swung the lens to the right. One guard sat in a chair, next to a door that was approximately twenty meters away. His head moved slightly back and forth, like he was nodding to someone who was talking to him. But he was the only one in the hall.
She zoomed the lens in on him. He was wearing earbuds, connected to a phone in his lap. Perhaps he was on a call, or maybe watching a video. Either way, he was distracted.
She motioned to her men, and once they joined her, they all continued down to the basement.
The weapon’s storage room was exactly where Vesna had been told it would be. Even the three sets of dead bolts were as advertised. All were high-end security models that would have given a normal thief a massive headache.But Vesna was no normal thief and was more than familiar with how to finesse the tumblers into place. Within seventy-five seconds, all three locks were undone.
The room beyond was stocked with all manner of deadly hardware and ammunition. Some weapons looked as if they’d come straight from the manufacturers, while others appeared old enough to have been used in the Bosnian war a few decades earlier.
As they had discussed ahead of time, Gregor laid out the duffel bags he’d been carrying, while Vesna, Josef, and Emmanuel began collecting weapons that were from the train robbery.
Handguns went into one duffel, rifles into another, and ammunition into the smaller third bag. One and a half minutes after entering the room, they were back in the corridor, each of Vesna’s men carrying one of the bags.
Vesna relocked the dead bolts, and they headed out the way they’d come, Lazovic’s people having no idea they were ever there.
Twenty-three minutes later and fifteen miles to the northeast, Vesna’s team was joined by four others, a block from Janic’s hideout, where the hostages were being held.
The team was made up entirely of former undercover operatives from intelligence agencies of various European countries. Some had once been enemies, but time had a way of shifting alliances.
Vesna and Gregor handed out the weapons. As instructed, no one had brought their own.
“Rules of engagement?” asked a man who had once worked for the Bulgarians.
“The only ones who walk out of there alive are the hostages and us.”
A Greek woman who had spent most of her working life in the Middle East grinned. “Sounds like fun.”
Vesna described the layout of the building and explained her plan. When she finished, she asked for any questions. There were none.
“In and out before the sun comes up,” she said. On the eastern horizon sat the barest hint of the coming day.
“Are you taking us out to breakfast after?”
“Of course. I’m not a barbarian.”
Breaching the three-story hideout was even simpler than the warehouse. Years of use by Janic’s organization had left the guards who worked there complacent. While the main entrances and exits were secured, the roof could be easily reached by placing a ladder over to it from the adjacent building.
The door to the roof stairwell was locked by a chain and padlock wrapped around the bars on the inside. Unfortunately for Janic’s people, whoever had secured the door had left enough slack in the chain that the door could be opened several inches, allowing one of Vesna’speople to slip through the jaws of a bolt cutter. A couple of snips and the chain was broken.
Several rooms on the top floor were filled with bunk beds. While most were empty, four were in use. Vesna’s team delivered the men sleeping in them to a more permanent slumber before heading downstairs.
They checked the second floor, but the rooms there were empty.
When they reached the first, they heard muffled voices coming from beyond the stairwell door. Vesna knelt in front of it and deployed her microcamera again. She could see light spilling out of several rooms in the hallway on the other side.
