Tracer, p.1
Tracer, page 1
Tracer
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight 94 hours, 3 minutes and counting…
Nine 83 hours, 45 minutes and counting…
Ten 82 hours, 7 minutes and counting…
Eleven 81 hours, 44 minutes and counting…
Twelve 81 hours, 11 minutes and counting…
Thirteen 80 hours, 18 minutes and counting…
Fourteen 75 hours, 28 minutes and counting…
Fifteen 75 hours, 11 minutes and counting…
Sixteen 74 hours, 57 minutes and counting…
Seventeen 69 hours, 48 minutes and counting…
Eighteen 69 hours, 34 minutes and counting…
Nineteen 69 hours, 19 minutes and counting…
Twenty 69 hours, 7 minutes and counting…
Twenty-One 68 hours, 43 minutes and counting…
Twenty-Two 65 hours, 15 minutes and counting…
Twenty-Three 65 hours and counting…
Twenty-Four 64 hours, 53 minutes and counting…
Twenty-Five 64 hours, 46 minutes and counting…
Twenty-Six 64 hours, 14 minutes and counting…
Twenty-Seven 63 hours, 53 minutes and counting…
Twenty-Eight 50 hours, 37 minutes and counting…
Twenty-Nine 26 hours, 21 minutes and counting…
Thirty 24 hours, 13 minutes and counting…
Thirty-One 24 hours, 2 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Two 23 hours, 53 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Three 23 hours, 46 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Four 23 hours, 37 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Five 23 hours, 23 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Six 23 hours, 17 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Seven 23 hours, 12 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Eight 22 hours, 57 minutes and counting…
Thirty-Nine 22 hours, 42 minutes and counting…
Forty 21 hours, 35 minutes and counting…
Forty-One 20 hours, 15 minutes and counting…
Forty-Two 16 hours, 53 minutes and counting…
Forty-Three 8 hours, 56 minutes and counting…
Forty-Four 3 hours, 11 minutes and counting…
Forty-Five 2 hours, 53 minutes and counting…
Forty-Six 2 hours, 23 minutes and counting…
Forty-Seven 1 hour, 29 minutes and counting…
Forty-Eight 58 minutes and counting…
Forty-Nine 50 minutes and counting…
Fifty 47 minutes and counting…
Fifty-One 27 minutes and counting…
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Stuart & Jaqi
One
The dead man pulled the keys from the ignition. Grabbing the burner phone from the glove compartment, he opened the door and got out of the Toyota.
As Korso took the thin, black leather attaché case from the trunk, he gave a brief shiver. It was cold in Sofia in February. Seemed every time he came to Bulgaria the weather was the same. He gave a mental shrug and brushed the thought aside. He wasn’t there for the climate. Patting his pockets again to make sure he was completely unarmed, Korso locked the vehicle and turned up his overcoat collar as he gave his surroundings another once-over.
Nothing had changed. Everything within sight was a variable shade of grey. The clouds in the sky. The derelict warehouses and slowly rotting factories on either side of the street. The cracked asphalt under his feet. His breath. Litter and huge puddles of black water everywhere. The smell of ancient oil, rust and pollution permeated everything. Not another living soul in sight. No vehicles, other than his silver rental. The faint whine of a jet in the distance. From a factory roof a hundred yards away, a murder of crows glared down at this new interloper and squawked, daring him to come any closer.
It had clearly been some years since this industrial park, located on the outskirts of the capital, had been a thriving concern. Now it was just neglected and forgotten, which naturally made it a perfect spot for certain parties to meet.
Avoiding the numerous potholes, Korso crossed the uneven street and began walking across the empty wasteland that separated two more dilapidated warehouses, heading in a northwesterly direction. He knew where he was going and how long it would take.
Less than three minutes later, he reached the industrial building he wanted. Fifty feet away, a short, stocky man in a badly fitting suit with the requisite shaved head was standing outside the main entrance. When he saw Korso approach, he casually pulled a piece from the holster under his jacket and spoke into an earpiece.
Korso didn’t need to lip read to know what he was saying. Although he could have.
He kept walking, not slowing his pace, his free arm far enough away from his body to show he was no immediate threat. The building was another abandoned factory, with a huge open space and a dozen offices on the ground floor and more offices upstairs. There were no windows at street level. The few on the second floor were all missing windowpanes.
When Korso was ten feet from the entrance, the guard motioned with the gun. ‘Stoy.’
Korso stopped.
‘Ruki.’
He carefully placed the attaché case on the ground and raised his hands. Another shaved head, this one with a carefully sculpted goatee, appeared from inside the building, clutching an SMG, a Belgian P90. The guard came over and gave Korso a thorough body search, inspecting his keys, his smartphone and his burner phone carefully before finally returning them to his coat pocket. He glanced down at the briefcase with the combination locks on either side of the handle.
‘You open this,’ he said.
‘Ask your boss first.’
The guard looked at him for a couple of beats, then shrugged and said, ‘You come.’ He turned and began walking back inside.
Korso picked up the attaché case and followed, knowing that the other one was right behind him, ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. Korso didn’t let it bother him.
Inside, the building was as cold, dark and depressing as the outside. There were huge holes in the roof, and rubble and rusted machinery everywhere. At the far end, Korso could see metal stairs leading to the second-floor mezzanine. A hundred feet away, standing next to a large steel table in the middle of the factory floor, were three more men. There was a third guard with a rapidly receding hairline, his long grey hair tied back in a ponytail. Next to him was a thin bespectacled guy in an expensive suit whom Korso had never seen before. And finally, there was an overweight, middle-aged man in a tracksuit with deep-set black eyes and salt and pepper hair cropped close to his skull. Tattoos covered his hands.
His name was Boris Gancharov. Korso knew he was involved in a whole horde of illicit enterprises both in Bulgaria and back home in Russia. He also knew Gancharov had ordered more than his fair share of killings over the years. Probably performed a fair few of them himself.
Gancharov checked his watch and smiled. ‘One fifty-nine. I like this.’ His deep voice echoed around the empty interior. ‘I place great importance on punctuality.’
‘I’d heard that about you,’ Korso said, and came to a stop ten feet from the table. He watched the guard he’d followed move away to his right and then turn to watch him. The other one was still lurking somewhere behind him.
‘Among other things, I am sure. So, my friend, I assume that handsome briefcase contains the item I commissioned you to recover, or why would we all be here. Am I right?’
‘The customer generally is.’
‘Ha. Excellent philosophy. Kindly bring it over here.’
The three men made a space and Korso walked over and placed the case on the table surface. He stepped back a pace and said, ‘The code is seven three nine four.’
Gancharov lost the smile. ‘You will open it for me.’
‘Of course.’ Korso moved forward, dialled the code into the two locks, and opened the case.
Two
Korso took a few steps back again to allow Gancharov room to view his prize. He watched and waited.
The attaché case interior was packed with grey, semi-rigid Ethafoam cubes. Resting securely within the carefully sculpted space in the centre was a small semi-automatic pistol. It was a 7.65 millimetre Walther PP with an intricately designed golden barrel and trigger. The italicised letters ‘AH’ on the off-white ivory grips were inlaid with gold. It also had something of an enviable history. To a certain type of collector, at least.
It had sure taken Korso a lot of time and effort to trace the damn thing. And even more to recover it.
Gancharov’s smile was back as he looked down at the gun. ‘Yes. Yes. This is it. See, Ivor?’ He pointed. ‘That tiny scratch on the lower part of the grip there? I still remember every detail like it was yesterday.’
The bespectacled man leaned in and spoke softly to Gancharov. Korso managed to catch a few Russian words in there, and acted as though he understood none of them.
‘Znaiyu, znaiyu,’ Gancharov said irritably, not taking his eyes from the gun. ‘You don’t have to remind me again, Ivor. Zamolchi.’
He reached down with his right hand and very carefully removed the antique weapon and brought it closer to his face. ‘Krasivaya.’ He turned to Korso. ‘Beautiful, is it not?’
‘A touch gaudy for me,’ Korso said. ‘But I admit there is something about it.’
Gancharov let out a long breath. ‘Yes, you recognise it too. A kind of mystique. Like an aura almost, no doubt due to the gun’s history and long line of ownership.’
‘The original owner’s probably got something to do with it too.’
‘Very true. And all that history only adds to its value,’ he said, turning to the man in spectacles, caressing the gun like a lover. ‘Carl Walther presented this specially made piece to the Führer on his fiftieth birthday on April 20, 1939, who then shipped it to his exclusive Munich apartment, where it remained in a desk drawer for the next six years.’
Ivor nodded. ‘I have heard about this golden gun, sir. They say he blew his own brains out with it in that bunker of his.’
Gancharov gave a loud snort. ‘Don’t be an ass, Ivor. That’s the kind of romantic horseshit I expect from Hollywood, not my accountant. Besides, his bunker was six hundred kilometres away in Berlin. As far as anyone knows he never set eyes on this gun again. No, the allies reached Berlin just before the end of the war, and when the Americans crashed Hitler’s empty apartment, an enterprising GI found the piece in his office drawer and took it for himself. I would have done the exactly the same.’
He popped the magazine, confirming it was empty, and carefully replaced it. ‘For some unknown reason, when this GI returns home he gives it to a friend of his, a church pastor in Georgia, who shows it off to his flock at every opportunity. No surprise then when one of these God-fearing fools decides to take it for himself and sell it on for a profit. That is in 1947. It is next spotted by a detective at a gun show in the Fifties and because he cannot afford to buy it, he photographs it for posterity. Then in 1966, it appears on the cover of a men’s magazine, along with an article that claims it is up for sale by a Cleveland gun dealer.’ He turned back to Korso. ‘You already know all of this.’
‘I couldn’t do my job if I didn’t.’
‘So maybe you will bring us up to date.’
Korso shrugged. ‘The Cleveland gun dealer sells it to a Canadian collector of Nazi memorabilia as the centrepiece of the museum he’s built on his farmland, but the tourists fail to come. It’s next seen again in the late Eighties, where it’s sold at auction for over a hundred thousand dollars, then the highest amount paid for a piece of military memorabilia. It gets sold to a millionaire in Australia, who sells it on to a dealer in Georgia again, and then on to another buyer in LA, an art collector named Jonathan Veehers.’
‘Who eventually sold it to me,’ Gancharov said. ‘For a lot of money, I might add. Although not nearly as much as Veehers hoped for. But then I am a persuasive fellow, and I truly enjoy bargaining. Especially when I have the upper hand.’
Korso recognised the not so hidden intent behind that remark, and immediately saw where this was going. He chose not to rise to the bait. Not yet.
Gancharov went on. ‘And then two years ago that beautiful whore of mine, Tanya, decides to run away from me and takes the piece with her, along with a sizeable chunk of cash from my safe. I almost admire her for that.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘Almost. And then she somehow disappears off the face of the earth. No sign of the bitch, or the gun, anywhere in all of those two years. And believe me, I looked.’ He smiled at Korso. ‘Yet you clearly managed to track her down when I and all my resources could not.’
‘All part of my job.’
‘Yes, your job. How did you phrase it to me originally? “Covert salvage operative”? I like that. It has a good ring to it. So tell me, where is she?’
‘My not answering that is part of the deal I made with her. The main part, actually.’
‘I could make you answer. My men could.’
‘Unlikely. It wouldn’t make any difference anyway.’
The Russian furrowed his brow. ‘Because she is not there anymore.’
‘Long gone. And she’s got a talent for vanishing.’ Among other things. Korso recalled once again the soft breath in his ear, the cool touch of long nails against his shoulder, the smooth curve of a naked hip pressed against his thigh. That particular night had been an enjoyable, if brief, interlude in an otherwise tortuous journey. ‘Like you said, she’s an admirable woman. Resourceful, too. Let’s leave it at that. I got you what you wanted.’
‘True. But paying out eight hundred thousand dollars for something that was already mine did not make me happy. Plus there is still your fee on top, of course.’
‘You knew it might cost from the outset. It could have been a lot more.’
‘And you could have just taken it from her and spared me the additional expense.’
‘Tanya’s not that stupid. She’d prepared a lot of safeguards between it and me, and it was obvious the only way to get it back was to pay her price.’
‘Obvious to you, maybe. The fact is, despite being this so-called finder of lost or stolen property, you could not recover my piece without a large sum of my own money.’
Korso shrugged. ‘That’s the way it goes sometimes.’
‘Perhaps. And so now you no doubt wish to be paid your percentage of this item’s market value. How much was that again? Thirty-three per cent?’
‘That’s right. Which is still less than the standard fifty per cent for salvage recovery. And payment on delivery, as originally agreed.’
‘So tell me, how do we value an antique with no defined market price?’
‘Well, you paid Jonathan Veehers two point seven million dollars for that gun fifteen years ago.’
‘How could you know that?’
‘I asked him. And that was a fraction of the gun’s true value back then, let alone now. You must have been at your most persuasive that day. But I’m not greedy. I’ll just use the amount you wired to Tanya as my yardstick, so we’ll value it at the same bargain-counter eight hundred thousand dollars. US dollars, that is.’
‘Very reasonable of you. And that brings your commission to…?’
‘Two hundred and sixty-four thousand,’ Ivor said.
‘Precisely,’ Korso said.
‘Still a great deal of money,’ Gancharov said, wiping the back of his free hand across his forehead. ‘Far too much, I think.’
Spotting movement to his right, Korso saw the guard with the goatee casually pull out his P90 and point it in his general direction. Facing forward, Korso saw that the goon at the table already had his piece out, some Russian SMG, and was aiming it directly at him. And he knew the hidden gunman behind him was just waiting for a chance to shoot him in the back.
Gancharov smirked. ‘I think maybe now is the perfect time for us to renegotiate our contract.’
Three
Korso let out a long breath. ‘I think maybe you’re right.’
‘I knew you would see sense. Remember, the customer is always right.’
‘Not always. What’s the time?’
‘The time?’ Gancharov glanced lazily at his gold Rolex. ‘Two fifteen. Why?’
‘And you took the gun from the briefcase at around five after, or thereabouts?’
