Page 23 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“Do you have a place to stay?”
“I…I was told that Mr. Rath will take care of me.”
She chuckled. “That one can barely take care of himself, but I’m sure he’s charmed someone to take you in like a stray puppy.”
They walked four blocks through neighborhoods that didn’t improve. Kids as feral as dogs loitered on stoops and watched passersby like predators. Horse manure filled the gutters, and the streetlamps threw light that barely made a dent in the darkness.
The tenement she took him to was indistinguishable from a hundred other buildings in the city. Brick front, small windows, seven stories, no elevator or hot water. Privy sitting alone on a patch of weedy ground in the back. Hanna had grown up in a handful of identical places, moving whenever fellow tenants were getting wise to her father robbing them every chance he could. They climbed to the fifth floor and Hanna knocked at one of the four doors. Balka himself opened up. He wore a black peacoat with a dark watchman’s cap perched on his head. Seeing his face gave Hanna a familiar twinge at the base of her belly.
“In,” he said brusquely and ushered the two inside.
The apartment was sparse, the furniture mismatched, but there were curtains in the window and color pictures cut from magazines pinned to the walls. These were feminine touches. A woman lived here, Hanna thought. This wasn’t Balka’s place. He’d borrowed it for this meeting.
“Vano?” Balka said, and the timid boy from the old country nodded.
Rath turned his attention to Hanna. He peeled a ten-dollar bill from a roll he kept in the pocket of his moleskin pants and held it out for her. “Beat it.”
She found courage at that moment and shot him a saucy wink as she took the cash. “For this kind of money, I’ll throw in a couple of other services, just for you.”
“Not if you were the cheapest whore in the world and I was John D. Rockefeller.”
He’d already turned away so never saw the look of murderous rage on her face that lent truth to the saying about women scorned.
“What do you have for me?” Balka asked as soon as the girl was gone.
“Karl sends you his greetings and this.” Vano set his suitcase down on the kitchen table and unwound the string ties that held it closed. He opened the lid. Nestled in the neatly folded clothes was the smallest radio transmitter Balka had ever seen. It was no bigger than a shoebox. Cased in black Bakelite, it had a couple of knobs and a window to display frequencies. There were insulated wires to connect it to a battery and a flexible metal antenna currently coiled up in the valise.
“What are my instructions?”
“Your brother wasn’t very specific in terms of what he has planned.”
“He never is,” Balka told him.
“But he says you are to turn on this radio every night at midnight and listen in on the frequency he has preselected. He will contact you. He said it won’t be for at least two weeks, so start listening in on the twenty-fifth of this month. He said you need access to a van and a reliable driver who will be available after the twenty-fifth no matter what.”
Balka thought Hanna’s brother, Hanzi Muntean, was perfect for that. He owned a box truck the family used to move stolen merchandise in and out of the city. Funny, he reflected, that when it came to an operation involving his brother, he would use only fellow Romani and not any of the trust-funded anarchists he knew.
He missed what Vano said next and asked him to repeat it. “Karl said you are to familiarize yourself with certain landmarks throughout the city, their addresses, and what is around them for several blocks.”
The young Romani courier rattled off six names that meant nothing to him, but which Rath knew well. If Karl was thinking of attacking any of these places, his ambitions had grown in the months since the two brothers were together. Not grown, he thought. They were oversized. Balka had serious doubts that Karl understood the scope of what he was planning. He also thought that Karl overestimated the commitment of the American anarchists. These were effete intellectuals for the most part; men who were dissatisfied with being pampered and wanted to pretend they mattered.
Even with a hardened cadre of men from back in Europe, any assault on one of these targets was tantamount to suicide. There was no doubt Balka would do what he’d been tasked with, but he didn’t understand it.
Again, the courier said something that Rath missed and had toask him to repeat it. “Finally, your brother said that you are to treat me like you did Patrin back in Sarajevo.”
That last sentence startled Balka. His eyes narrowed. “Are you sure he said Patrin?”
“Yes. Like you did in Sarajevo. He said you would know what this means.”
It was one thing to use up local people, strangers. They meant nothing. However, Vano was one of them, maybe not of their clan, but of their people. For such a step, Karl had something big planned indeed. As he’d only made such an order once before.
Patrin Kirpachi had been the man to smuggle the gun from a Serbian paramilitary group called the Black Hand to Gavrilo Princip, who later used it to assassinate the heir of the Austrian empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife. For security reasons, the Black Hand demanded the courier be silenced—permanently. Karl had ordered Balka to do it himself. Balka, never one to shirk a direct order in furthering their cause of anarchy across Europe, subsequently garroted his best friend.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he muttered under his breath and threw a right cross that the young man never suspected or saw coming.
Vano was unconscious before he collapsed to the floor with a thud that made the shoddily built structure shudder. His jaw was dislocated, and several teeth were loosened, but he was in a realm beyond pain.
Balka went to the small window and opened it up against its stop. He peered out and down. He saw no movement, and only a little light from the building on the opposite end of the courtyard. No one was heading for the outhouse. He lifted the courier off the floor by slipping his hands under Vano’s armpits. The boy weighed less than a hundred and twenty pounds, and while Balka himself wasn’tparticularly big, he was immensely strong. He dragged the unconscious man to the window and jockeyed him so that his upper chest lay over the sill, his arms dangling into the night.
