The Perfect Instinct Read online

  Depending on the status of security checks through Croatia, they could make it to Trieste by nightfall.

  Bojan was sure that more than one man riding in the vehicle with him and the one behind thought it silly to drive all this way to Trieste when other sea ports, including dozens of out of the way inlets, were closer. He understood their questions and their reservations. It was his father who convinced him of the importance of having a network of associates you could count on; could bribe and blackmail, if not trust. Bojan relied on a loose network of smuggling operations based in Trieste.

  He could count on one hand the times he'd been let down by his Trieste confidants. One of the incidents involved an associate who decided to take an extra slice of the pie. Bojan ended taking a cut of the man's left hand. He left the right hand intact so the man could work off his debt. Another time, someone inside the network tipped off authorities. That ended up costing Bojan an extra $100,000 or so in "fines."

  For most of the previous decade, when the war allowed him, Bojan worked with his Ukrainian contact in Trieste. A bombastic individual with a penchant to dress a little too nice for the smuggling business. But he had such wonderful contacts up the ladder.

  On a few occasions in the past five years, Bojan was forced to work with Elena and her hidden network. They specialized in certain areas, certain products that others just could not transport in a cost-effective manner. She charged a significant premium for her services, but always delivered the goods on time.

  Bojan was amazed that separate operations worked so close together without killing one another. The Ukrainian, it was rumored, had connections directly to Moscow. He dropped the three-letter acronym for the Soviet, now Russian secret spy agency on several occasions. Bojan only nodded each time.

  Elena, who he only met in person once, had no such connections into spy agencies, but did have a network of ruthless murderers at her disposal. Probably the only reason the Ukrainian had a business in Trieste was because Elena saw the value in having another player in the market to take some of the heat off of her activities.

  No one knew where she came from. Most guessed Slovenia. But many of the more ruthless people inhabiting Trieste hail from Slovenia, directly to the north and east. Hell, the Slovenes believe they own and run Trieste. That was funny.

  Both Elena and Voloshyn were in for a surprise tonight.

  Bojan smiled into his palm. He looked at Novar beside him, the young soldier behind the wheel driving the large SUV, and then to the others in the second row. No one saw the smile. He preferred it that way. Any happiness or joy that he could experience was for him and him alone. He once smiled all the time, every day. When he and his beautiful young bride welcomed their first child, a boy, and then a second, a luminous little girl. Smiles galore. They were a happy family and he provided well for them.

  But those smiles, like those three glorious lights that shined so bright in this dark world, were gone. Bojan looked out the window at the passing fields and trees and barren earth of late winter. He wondered why he still cared, why he still fought.

  It surely wasn't for glory. The idealist fantasy of the glory for championing culture or creed or family or God was just a foolish dream. The reality of war, with death to the left and then to the right and in front and behind you, proved there was no glory in this. None.

  He should never have left them. He shook his head with eyes closed for maybe the ten-thousandth time. No matter how he tried, he could never rid the emptiness from his mind.

  The stark, cold, gray of the home, his home when he returned from that first tour of duty with his Serbian brethren. He rushed home with others from his company when word spread of clashes and raids in the area surrounding their remote Bosnian village populated by ancestral Serb families. Burnt out vehicles along the road on the outskirts of town caused his insides to seize up. Recent graves dug beside the road just a quarter-mile from his home caused his heart to race and skip beats.

  He leapt from the truck he was riding in and raced up the gravel drive to his modest home at the crest of a small hill. No one was home. No wife. No son, no daughter. No mother-in-law.

  All gone.

  All dead. He knew.

  He knew the telltale signs of death. Blood pooled on floors. Bullet holes pock-marking plaster walls. Broken doors barely hanging on broken hinges.

  Bojan raced from the empty lifeless home into the surrounding woods shouting their names, firing his automatic rifle up into the trees. Others from his company followed. He was always a leader of men. This new army of united Bosnian Serbs was no different. The half-dozen men following behind Bojan kept their distance but scanned the horizon through the trees in case the enemy was still nearby.

  After a time, Bojan returned to the home but did not enter. He never went back inside again. This family home for generations was no longer his. It belonged to evil and hate and death and vengeance. On his knees in the front lawn he dropped his rifle and looked at his empty hands. They would never again hold the ones he loved. This was repayment, karma. The evil and death he and others had visited upon Bosniak and Croat villages during the previous six months came here to visit his village, his home.

  He and the others in his company of killers had visited homes just like his own. And innocent lives were ended in pools of blood with bullet-riddled walls. War does this; changes people into killers. And when you return home, you find that war changes everything, forever.

  He opened his eyes as the traveling troupe passed by a cemetery. Ancient headstones marked lives lost in war and peace down through centuries. A new grave was being dug for the next to be returned to the earth from whence we came. Bojan nodded in recognition of that life. He hoped it was well lived, worthy of celebration.

  His life was once a celebration of family and heritage and trade passed down from fathers to children for generations. But there would be no celebration of his life's last chapter. He was resolved to that. What needed to be done would be remembered but not celebrated. This last chapter started in Trieste tonight.

  Chapter 11

  Sitting around, doing nothing... Never Marta's bag.

  This whole thing, this stupid little trip he was on was really hers. It was her previous life and her work and her plans. Trieste, like Paris and Milan and Prague and Vienna and Lyons, were hers. Working under the clandestine direction of Gregor the Terrible, she and her band of misfits moved in, tore down, removed and rebuilt networks. It was a series of brilliant black hole KGB coup d'e tats.

  Marta was ruthless in purging the ranks of treasonous, treacherous, obsolete and ineffective agents and deep-cover operatives. They were all crooked, all turned by their years in or working too closely with those from the west. Temptations proved too great. All of them were once good operatives who needed to be stripped of their velvet or gold or diamond façades. She built new clandestine shadow criminal networks. All designed to be managed at an extended and hidden arm's length by Moscow.

  Smelinski stayed behind the scenes guiding these smuggling or blackmail or drug-dealing networks all in an effort to gain, retain and utilize information. Millions and millions of dollars in annual revenue generated by these criminal enterprises were used to gather information and leverage for the KGB, now the FSB.

  And no one but Marta and Smelinski knew all the details.

  It was brilliant stuff; years ahead of its time.

  And Marta did it all. A young KGB agent herself, her work was simply astounding. Her ability to recognize weakness behind a veneer of strength and drive a razor thin wedge to leverage this weakness was innate. She saw through the lies and misdirection.

  Trieste was Marta's crowning achievement in this off-the-books European Tour. The long-established smuggling operation Smelinski directed her to subvert and rebuild in her unique image would be her last completed operation for her KGB boss. In the months after Trieste, she would be tasked with a wholly different assignment - tracking and recovering stolen Soviet nuclear warheads. That opera
tion led her to Baghdad and a fateful encounter with one Lance Priest. But that was indeed another story.

  The Trieste Marta found upon her arrival in the Spring of 1990 was a hot bubbling mess. A former colonel from the Red Army, who transitioned into the KGB in the 1970s during the good ol’ Cold War, headed the KGB-front smuggling operation. And as much as the west liked to believe that the Soviet Union and Tito's Yugoslavia were in communist lockstep with each other, nothing could be further from the truth.

  They were partners only in the fact that each was wary of expansion and aggression by Western Europe, and by extension, the United States. But that was about it. The USSR viewed Yugoslavia as a headache and pain in the rear that must be tolerated. And Moscow put in place any number of clandestine operations in the Balkans to keep track of any developments that might give them an advantage in leveraging a breakup and breakout by the representative countries comprising the Slavic confederation.

  The colonel had plenty of experience in working a system to his advantage from his time in the army. He knew that the only constants in this world are human weakness and corruption. He drilled into a vein and mined it for all it was worth. He and his KGB-funded goons owned the illicit Trieste waterfront. And they skimmed something off of every shipment of illegitimate goods. It was an incredibly successful operation, for them.

  KGB leadership, including one Gregor Smelinski, thought maybe, just maybe, the colonel might be coloring outside the lines. He supplied decent intel on the movement of goods and human cargo into the Balkans, but there was an ever-present suspicion he might be holding back.

  Marta did her usual effective and thorough background work in the days after arriving in Trieste. Her cover as a carefree German tourist looking for fun allowed her into the looser side of the seaside village. Within four days, she established and nurtured several relationships that led to the colonel.

  It was a little too easy. When she played her turn card on the fifth day, an invitation from the local KGB leader came by that evening. She accepted and was alone in the presence of the old fella by midnight. Easy.

  Sitting at the end of a leather couch with the colonel at the other end, a 26-year old Marta accepted his flirts and replied with flirtatious glances and words of her own, but her flirts spoke of money, oodles of money, not sex. The colonel liked money. He could never have enough. And if this pretty young women swimming in depths well beyond her capabilities wished to hand him a nice sum for the safe importation of products, well then, of course he would oblige.

  "Why then, let us proceed with a business arrangement," she stammered. Her spoken Italian with a thick Bavarian accent was clumsy.

  The colonel smiled and made it easy on her by speaking German, "Yes, let us. I will have you make arrangements with a member of my team. Should we get back together tomorrow evening to confirm details? Perhaps over dinner?"

  Marta smiled and batted lashes. "Dinner would be wonderful, but can we meet day after tomorrow? I need to meet an associate tomorrow in Venice. Where should I meet you and what time?"

  "I will ring your hotel with specifics on the location and time a few hours before we dine." And he leaned and reached out a hand.

  Marta reached to accept his gesture. "Of course. I'll look forward to your call. And I'm quite sure you will choose a fantastic restaurant for dinner."

  "Of course, I will surprise you with a very unique location and a cuisine to delight your senses."

  Marta left the room and made her way back to the base location she found within hours of arriving. She always worked to find a hidden base of operations as quickly as possible when moving into a new city. The model had proven effective in every operation.

  Over the next 46 hours, she completed a whirlwind of logistical ballet moves, including securing guns, humans to use the guns, additional funds, a supply of various drugs and more guns.

  She was still putting in place the final piece of the puzzle when the Colonel's phone call was relayed from the hotel in which she had taken a room. This final piece of her Trieste network takedown operation was Elena Stefanko. Marta was committed to a wholesale change out of the colonel's network. Elena was an interesting choice, crazy even.

  At 21, she was still a baby in many eyes. She was thin, slight, somewhat attractive in a Bohemian way. But the head of a smuggling network? Smelinski was likely to blow a vessel over this.

  But Marta saw something in the first few moments after spotting Elena on the second day in Trieste. Marta was prowling the night and ended up at a tiny bar populated solely by locals. At the rear of the smoke-filled, wine-stained room, Elena was seated at a table with three others. To the casual observer, it appeared to be a friendly gathering, but Marta is anything but casual in her observation of humanity. Seeing through the facades, the bluster, the act, that is her innate ability.

  And within seconds, she noted that Elena was not engaged in a pleasant conversation with tablemates. It was her right foot.

  It was flat to the floor. Every other woman in the club had their heels off the floor. This universal desire to please the other sex unfortunately permeates throughout the female human population. Add alcohol and other mind-altering substances to the equation, and a room populated by competitive females is unfortunately all too often a room filled with humans seeking any and all forms of approval.

  Elena, the skinny gal in ripped jeans, sneakers and wrinkled jacket sought no such approval. Marta could see it. As she watched from the corner of her eye, the conversation around Elena's table turned suddenly heated. The two men seated opposite Elena pushed back and began to get up. They didn't make it.

  In lightning fashion, Elena kicked out her left leg and foot and made violent contact with the knee joint of the guy on the left. In the next motion, she swung around her left hand with fingers and thumb extended, like a handshake. But this hand had ill will and made violent contact with the throat of the gentleman on the right.

  And in the next moment, Elena rose and stepped around the table to grasp and slam onto the tabletop the left hand and knife in it of the woman to her right. An elbow to a temple concussed the woman and sent her limp in the chair and then down to the floor.

  Marta counted eight seconds for the entire exchange. Quick work.

  She watched as Elena reached down and picked up a leather bag off the floor next to the woman's chair and turned toward the door. She left on the floor behind her the guy gripping his ruined knee, the other grasping at his throat and the woman out cold.

  The scene barely caused a fuss and most in the loud club missed the action entirely. Very smooth, very smart.

  Marta rose, dropped a bill on the bar and followed Elena. The younger woman was already across the street and making her way around the corner. Marta crossed the street headed the other direction and turned the corner where she broke into a sprint.

  At the end of the block, she stopped to peek around the corner and spotted Elena headed the other direction on foot. Marta burst forward and across the street into an alley for a block and then right, where she turned up the speed and raced two blocks.

  She reached the next cross street and spotted Elena getting into a parked car. She sprinted and closed the gap before Elena turned the ignition. Standing beside the tiny Fiat, Marta pulled a gun and tapped the barrel on the glass. Elena looked up at her and then looked forward while starting the car. Marta stepped back and aimed at the front tire. She wanted to see what this talented girl could, or more importantly, would do.

  And Elena did the best of all things. She put the car in park, opened her door and jumped out to stand just feet in front of Marta who held her SIG Sauer 9mm aimed at Elena's left thigh.

  "Can I help you?" Elena asked in Italian.

  "Who are you?" Marta replied in Russian.

  "My Russian is not good, but my name is Elena. You are?" Clumsy, but not bad Russian.

  "Your last name?" Marta only knew a few hundred words in Slovene.

  "Ah, you speak my native tongue as well.
Elena."

  "What happened back there?" Marta asked in German.

  Elena just looked at her this time and then up and down the dark and empty street. "Who are you? You're not Trieste police. I'd recognize you. Are you SISDE?" Elena asked if Marta was an agent of Italy's spy agency.

  Marta stifled a laugh at that suggestion.

  "You didn't answer the question?" French this time.

  "No, I don't speak French. And I think you'd better tell me who you are right now." Elena even took a step forward. Brazen, Marta liked that. And to see just what this young gal had, Marta lowered her gun to her side. She lowered her eyes to Elena's feet.

  Marta, unlike Lance, did not look for the first move in a human's neck or shoulder or eye. She knew any move, especially one in a forward direction, began in the feet, the toes. So she took her eyes off of Elena's and kept her sights on her feet.

  "I'll tell you who I am in time. You didn't answer me, what happened back there in the bar?" Marta asked this last question in English.

  "English now, great. How many more languages?" Elena's reply for cover. Before she said the fifth word, she began her attack. Marta watched it start in the young attacker's balled up toe within her right sneaker and then the bend of her ankles as she leaned forward to explode.

  Marta raised her eyes to survey the attack. The downward pressure of the girl's right thigh showed it was going to be a left hand coming first. Marta watched the raising of said left hand and arm and leaned ever so slightly to her right. The balled left fist of her opponent shot passed her left shoulder. Marta quickly adjusted her right foot and leg to apply downward pressure that allowed her to throw her left shoulder into the younger woman's left shoulder, moving her forward.

  This action resulted in Elena being propelled forward and down. She did a shoulder-roll and then exploded back onto her feet and back at Marta. But Marta wasn't there. She had stepped backward into the street, which kept her even with Elena so that when the girl exploded back in the other direction she now had her back to Marta.