The Perfect Instinct Page 7

  What Preacher saw in the rewind in his head that wasn't kosher was the guy standing next to a parked blue sports car on the hill, more like a ledge, 90-feet away. That guy was there to watch, to survey and report back on what he saw. Looked like he was even taking photos using a camera with a nice big lens. Not cool.

  Preacher just shaved off his fuzzy 6-week growth beard. The brim of the hat and sunglasses wouldn't hide his face entirely, especially when a close-up zoom photo was developed and enhanced. The thought of a photo of him taken in the morning light of day pissed him off. He stopped. He stepped off the road into a driveway between two tight houses and closed his eyes to shoot up to 1,500 feet to get a birds eye view of the neighborhood. Thirty nine seconds had passed since he bolted from beside the gas station.

  He looked down at his current GPS location from on high. Picked out the routes the police were likely to split into and saw his best approach back to where he was a minute before. He wanted that camera and to ask that gentleman just who he planned to share those photos with.

  Always do the unexpected. Always.

  Heart rate elevated. Knees rising and lowering. Feet gliding. He was a precision machine. Months of extended daily running in thin mountain air had him at peak physical condition. He cracked up. "Peak condition," bad mountain pun.

  He ran up a short driveway and jumped over a wall into a back yard and then across the small yard to another wall and another tiny back yard and then another wall and driveway. He crossed the street and raced into yet another yard and then jumped three walls in succession to bring him back parallel with the ledge above the gas station. He watched two police cars race off in the direction he'd gone up the hill. The other circled back the other direction to head up the hill on a parallel street. He rounded a corner of an apartment building and came upon the gentleman in his shiny blue suit getting into the Porsche.

  He locked eyes with the guy and reached for the gun inserted into his belt on his back under his jacket. Your move buddy.

  The guy reached for the key in the ignition, fired it up and threw the sport scar into reverse. Too slow. Preacher was already sprinting with gun pulled. He raced up beside the Porsche and aimed the Beretta at the gent's well coiffed head. But he also looked down into the passenger side widow and what the guy reached for next to the stick shift. It was an Uzi.

  Great.

  Preacher instinctively dropped to the pavement as a dozen shots fired out through the shattered passenger window. He rolled to the right, to the rear of the vehicle and rose to a knee ready to fire from a three-quarter angle. That's when he heard the door open, the guy roll out and as Preacher dropped to get a shot at the fella's ankles, he saw the feet leave the ground.

  He rolled to the right again and watched as the guy stepped over and jumped down the 15-foot wall to the rear parking lot of the gas station he had been in just a minute and a half earlier.

  Preacher edged close to look over and down and saw the guy get to his feet and backpedal toward the front of the station. He held the Uzi in his left hand and the camera with a large lens in his right hand. This wasn't good. Full light of day. Police around. A guy with an Uzi running through the streets ahead of him.

  Follow.

  He waited until the dude was around the front of the gas station to swing over the railing on the ledge and drop down the wall to the parking lot pavement. He swung to the left with gun pulled as he moved forward.

  When he reached the corner wall of the building, he dropped to his side and stuck his head around six inches off the ground. Uzi guy was up ahead now on the street looking back with that badass little automatic mini-machine gun down casually at his side. The clip in that little killing machine holds 22 rounds. Approximately 12 fired so far. Still plenty enough to do damage.

  Preacher rolled to his side and then to his feet and burst forward in a sprint. He wished he'd purchased a black market silencer along with the black market Beretta. That was number two on Marta's written list.

  Would have been nice to fire a few shots now as he ran forward. As Preacher passed the gas pumps, the guy with the Uzi spotted him and did an interesting thing.

  Instead of pointing the little murder machine back at Preacher, he turned his aim to a group of half a dozen tourists gathered on the street corner. Smart. The guy knew Preacher didn't want the police swinging back this way to investigate a multi-casualty incident.

  So Preacher stepped forward into the road and began walking parallel with Mr. Uzi across the street. The guy stopped when he was 15-feet past the small crowd of tourists. Preacher stopped when he was exactly across the street from the shiny blue suit. Each of them held a gun at their side. And interestingly enough, both started to smile.

  They were 35-feet apart. The Uzi would spray, but still likely hit Preacher if fired in his direction. It would make a bloody mess of the tourists if the dude chose to fire into the small crowd oblivious to what was happening around them.

  Preacher wouldn't miss from here once he started firing.

  "You have something there I need." Preacher called out in Russian.

  "And what is that?" Came the reply in Italian.

  "Drop the camera right there and you can walk away. I won't follow."

  The guy shook his head and smiled broader. "You are in no position to make demands my friend."

  "I am in perfect position to end this very quickly." Preacher lifted the gun slightly. "You can make a mess with that spray gun. But the moment you lift that thing I will put you down with three in the chest." He stepped forward. "And then I'll come over and put two more through your brain. I'll take the ID out of your wallet and go find others and do the same to them. One, two..."

  The guy flinched. People who think themselves tough, when faced with someone who knows they are much more than tough, will give in. Give up.

  After a few moments, he tucked the Uzi in his belt under his suit jacket and slowly lowered the camera to the ground by its strap. He slowly stepped away and walked backwards down the street.

  Preacher let him get 50-feet down the road before coming across to grab the camera. He then stepped up to the crowd of tourists and took his jacket and hat off and put the camera around his neck. He mingled with the group, who turned out to be a nice extended family from Vienna down for an annual Trieste getaway.

  When a police car came speeding by with lights flashing and sirens wailing, the officer didn't give the group of now seven tourists on the street corner a second look. Lance hung with the family for 10 minutes as they walked down to the water's edge to view the sailboats heading out from the marina. He bid the family farewell and promised to look them up next time he was in town.

  Chapter 15

  Captain Rodrigo expertly worked the main sail and jib to bring the Santa Maria around in the light southern winds. The item was floating just where it was supposed to be. The ship it had "fallen off" was now more than two miles away, to the south and heading further south out of the Adriatic to the Mediterranean. No direct contact ship to ship; that was the agreement.

  He deftly maneuvered the sailboat up to the floating item. It was about the size of a large cooler. Rodrigo hooked it, pulled it in and lifted the somewhat heavy package up into the boat in a very fluid motion. He continued on without slowing. Nothing to see here. Just a captain and his sailboat enjoying a beautiful early spring day on the Adriatic.

  He set the coarse for north by northwest, tied the lines and stepped over to the package. He was curious about its contents and moved it around to look at every side of the object. It was an airtight and watertight storage box, an industrial type. It was made of impact resistant plastic. Very solid. Looked like it could take a few bullets and a drop from some height and be fine. It obviously had buoyancy since it was floating in the ocean current.

  No markings of any kind. The device did have a lock with a combination mechanism. He wanted to spend a few minutes seeing if he could open it, but that was not the deal. The $500,000 payday he was set to receive
for this unopened delivery kept him from being too curious. Add the half-million to his already impressive hidden offshore savings, and retirement waited in the not-so-distant future back on shore.

  He left the package securely strapped to the railing and stepped back over to the wheel. He looked at his watch. It was just after 2:30 pm. He should make it back to Trieste by 8:30 pm and make the exchange a couple of hours after that. Voloshyn would be looking for his usual cut for brokering the deal. That was fine. There was plenty of profit built into this transaction. The Ukrainian's finders' fee was puny for this one.

  With the wind and ocean spray in his eyes and hair, Captain Rodrigo began to sing one of his favorites. It was from an opera he'd seen more than a dozen times in Venice. Perhaps he would swing down to his favorite little spot on the Adriatic next week to celebrate this latest cache.

  Chapter 16

  "I know, this is not the plan. None of it. Couldn't be helped." Lance was in a small courtyard of an apartment complex, resting on a bench. The rocky beauty of the ocean landscape spread out before him but he couldn't see it. He was watching Marta's mouth forming the sounds that made the Chinese language so distinct. He held the cell phone to his ear with his eyes closed.

  "Twenty three." Marta replied. She didn't need to tell him the time. The stopwatch in his head was always counting, always. He was down to less than 24 hours in Trieste.

  "Yes."

  "You worked four through nine?" Number three had been the bar.

  "No, only four, six and nine. The others next." Lance hadn't been able to check all of the items off the list she supplied due to the shooting and chasing and the police and gentleman with the Uzi a couple of hours earlier.

  "Hurry. Love." And the line was severed. He listened to the Chinese words she just spoke again in his head. Congmang. Ai.

  He opened his eyes and took in the beauty before him. It brought a smile, but so did she. Marta was always brilliant. The list she supplied him obviously held secrets she learned along the way. Like Rodrigo, the long-haired sailboat captain who was obviously much more than that. Had to be CIA.

  He worked through the items checked off already. Only the bar last evening netted results. He wanted to work through the others right now, but he needed to stay under the radar and out of sight of the police during the day. So he couldn't just walk the streets and visit the locations she listed for him. He rubbed his chin, forgetting for the moment that he shaved off the scraggly bristle earlier. He missed rubbing it. Gave him something to do while thinking.

  As he worked through the remaining items on the list of 13, he thought for a few moments about the other list he was given by another brilliant manipulator two years earlier. The Black Angel list.

  Friggin' Siebel.

  He shook his head thinking through what he'd done while strung out on heroin and loss and emptiness and hate. Lance was resolved to the bare fact that he was one of the world's worst mass murderers over the past seven years. He killed hundreds. It came naturally. Just comes to him in the moment, like a lie, a photographic image, a song.

  How did Siebel know he would be this good at doing bad? He sat forward and rested forearms on knees. No reason to dwell on that now. Plenty of time to catch up with Papa some other time.

  He was about to return to the list when another number flashed in his memory. It was the license plate of the Porsche Mr. Uzi was in up there on the hill. Didn't look like that was a rental car. That plate would be registered to someone and Lance had a feeling that certain 'someone' was intimately connected to all this. The more he thought about the guy in that Porsche, the more he came to think it was likely he called the police to alert them to Lance's presence in the gas station bathroom.

  "That smart little fella was following me and I totally missed it." He whispered.

  Damn.

  In life, one has to lie. It happens to us all. No one, not one human makes it through without lying. Lance Priest can't seem to make it through 10 minutes around other human beings. He was up and on his feet and moving across the street and into a cafe where he told the proprietor his horrible news. Someone just stole his blue Porsche 944. He needed to borrow a phone and report the theft to the police.

  The cafe's owner offered his sincere apologies and brought the phone up onto the counter and dialed the emergency number for the poor fella. A moment later, an officer was on the other end. Lance spoke in bad Italian with a heavy German accent and told the officer the make, color and license number of the vehicle. The officer was able to type this information into a computer and confirm the name and address the vehicle was registered to.

  Lance confirmed the information, thanked the officer and hung up, thanking the cafe owner with a bill slapped onto the counter. Outside, he moved back across the street and then across the next street and stepped into a clothing store. He purchased all new attire and changed into brown slacks, black shirt, a new plaid jacket, hat and scarf. Walking out the door with his old clothes in a plastic shopping bag, he looked the part of a wealthy man without a care. The scarf pulled up and hat pulled down covered two-thirds of his face as he strolled up the street to the corner to catch a taxi.

  He gave the driver an address a block over from the one given him by the helpful police officer 30 minutes earlier. The ride took only seven minutes. At the destination, he thanked the driver and tipped him well, while never showing his face. The little that he spoke was precise Italian. Should the taxi driver ever be asked, he could only say the well-dressed gentleman was polite, classy, tipped well.

  Had he paid closer attention, the driver would have noticed his passenger wore leather gloves. No trace of him being in the taxi.

  Walking away from the taxi, Lance continued his survey of the surroundings he started from inside the vehicle. The four-story apartment building on the next block over looked nondescript to the casual observer. Plain design, outdated shutters, weatherworn paint showing age. But looks are deceiving. Lance noticed other details as he slowly walked toward the building.

  Four video cameras in view, reinforced heavy front gate, eight-foot rock wall. He glanced around at other apartment and condo buildings in the vicinity and none of them had anything approaching this level of security. But that wasn't all. It was the wall. It wasn't right.

  He turned around casually and walked the other direction away from the apartment building. When he reached the next street, he turned right and headed north up a fairly steep hill. He was walking uphill parallel with the street that ran next to the apartment building. Another multi-tenant building was between him and the structure he was surveying.

  Just over 100 yards up the hill, he reached a cross street that went off into the distance to the left, but to the right, this narrow lane dead-ended into the wall surrounding the next building over. Tall trees grew up and over the wall, providing a thick natural barrier. He couldn't see it, but he was pretty sure another structure was back there, behind the trees.

  He kept walking straight ahead across the street and on for another block. He kept his head angled down. Overhead, mounted on the top of the buildings he passed were more video cameras. A definite perimeter around the apartment building a block to the east existed.

  At the next cross street, he turned right and saw the wall at the north end of the apartment block. He expected to see another heavy gate at this north side of the property, but there was none. He crossed to the other side of the small lane and could see up ahead that the wall extended to the end of the block. The thick line of trees and bushes ran right along with the wall. As he walked past this backside of the complex, he tried to peek in through the tree branches but couldn't see much of anything. Looked like a house, but nothing definite.

  As he reached the far end of the wall and hung a right on the next street, he could see another smaller apartment building with a parking garage as the first level. Where the wall traveled up the hill, the apartment building behind the wall was built into the hill. The parking garage for the apartments looke
d like a portion of it went on into the hillside, like it had been carved out or tunneled into the stone. And up on the top of this apartment building was mounted yet another video camera.

  His luck had likely run out and no doubt he'd been spotted walking around the perimeter. So he stopped and did what any good lying agent would do and put on an act for the cameras. He pulled out the cell phone from his pocket and pretended to dial a number. He put the phone to his ear and pretended to speak to someone. He did so in German.

  "Hello, yes. I am hear but I can't seem to find your building." He raised his hand and pointed down the street he was on and then turned back up the hill and pointed, always keeping his face aimed away from the camera. "Ok, thank you. I'll be there shortly."

  He headed down the hill and then stepped into an open gate into the apartment building complex. He crossed the shallow parking lot and walked into the parking garage on the first level of the building. He stepped beside a tiny Fiat and surveyed the space. He couldn't see it, but was sure there would be a video camera in here.

  He advanced forward into the dark underground parking spaces carved into the side of the hill with the apartment units above. He decided to hug the wall on the left and continued toward the end of the structure when he spotted the camera. It was mounted on the left wall and aimed toward the center of the parkade. The camera just happened to be above a roll-up garage door.

  Aha. It was there to watch for cars, or confirm who was driving an approaching vehicle. A plaque next to the closed roll-up door stated Private Resident Parking. Interesting.

  Lance closed his eyes and worked through it all.

  An apartment building fronting the main street; another structure behind; imposing wall around the complex; only one visible entrance to the facility from the main street; video camera surveillance on all surrounding buildings; hidden vehicle access through this garage, and likely others.