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.”Jax could feel the heat of the sun baking his shoulders and the top of his head.He said, “Yet he agreed to raise it anyway?”“They showed him the submarine’s original manifest.”“Not a copy?”“No.The original.”Jax studied the man’s fleshy, sweat-sheened face.“So what was the sub carrying?”Erkan’s gaze slid away.The agora was virtually deserted, an open space of weed-grown paving stones and row after row of white marble columns.A Scandinavian couple were exploring the water channels and reservoirs of the western stoa.Two boys on the other side of the chain-link fence were playing a jumping game.Jax could hear the lilting sound of their laughter carrying on the breeze as a large man in a light blue windbreaker crossed the courtyard, his hands in his pockets.“Jasha was a great one for running schemes,” Erkan was saying.“Once he learned what was on the U-boat, Jasha knew he could find a buyer for it.”“You mean, another buyer?”“That’s right.The men who hired him planned to be there when the Yalena raised the submarine.They were going to remove the cargo and just sink the U-boat again, so no one would know it had ever been raised.But Jasha, he got the idea to raise the old submarine a day early.He was going to take it back to Kaliningrad, remove the cargo, and then sell the U-boat to me for the steel.You know about pre-1945 steel?”“Yes.” The man in the windbreaker was getting closer.He was taller than Lowenstein’s driver, and darker, but he had that same swooping handlebar mustache.“In other words,” said Jax, “Jasha was going to double-cross the men who hired him.”“He planned to hide the U-boat at the shipyard, then go out with the men who’d hired him the next day and pretend to be as surprised as anyone when they discovered the sub already gone.He thought he was just dealing with thieves.” Erkan exhaled sharply through his nostrils.“Not killers.”“What was the cargo?”Erkan paused in front of one of the massive columns.He’d changed suits, Jax noticed.A fine lightweight gray wool rather than the navy he’d worn that afternoon.He fiddled with the jacket’s top button, buttoning and then unbuttoning it.“What was the cargo?” Jax said again.“If it wasn’t gold, what was it?”“You think—” Erkan began, just as the man in the windbreaker walked up to him, pulled a big Heckler and Koch from beneath his jacket, and shot Erkan point blank in the chest.35The Heckler and Koch was a massive model 23.The mustachioed man in the light blue windbreaker squeezed off three rounds, one after the other.The big hollow-point through-and-throughs tore through Erkan and blew out his back.Blood splattered the white marble column behind him as shattered shards of stone exploded into the air.The man in the windbreaker shoved the H&K beneath his jacket again and kept walking.For one suspended moment, Erkan wavered, still on his feet, his white shirt blooming a charred scarlet.He opened his mouth to speak and a torrent of blood spilled down his chin.Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed.He fell backward in an ungainly sprawl, arms flung out at his sides, his exquisitely tailored gray suit falling open to reveal a small Walther PPK in a holster clipped inside the waistband of his slacks.Jax snatched it up.Walking quickly, the killer had almost reached the gate.Jax shoved Erkan’s Walther under his shirt and followed him, also at a walk.It was never a good idea to run away from a dead body.It tended to attract attention.Other people were running—running toward Erkan.Jax kept walking.At the gate, the man in the pale blue windbreaker threw a quick glance over his shoulder.He saw Jax and began to run.“Shit,” said Jax, and sprinted after him.They pelted down a crooked lane between narrow whitewashed houses that loomed up to cast the worn paving stones into shadow.This was an old part of town, one of the few areas that had escaped the Great Fire of 1922.Jax dodged café tables, scarlet geraniums spilling out of clay pots, a sleeping gray cat.The killer hung a quick left, into a shady, stone-paved passageway so steep it soon gave up and became steps.Jax tore after him, the soles of their shoes clattering on the broad ancient stairs, the scent of damp stone and ancient decay wafting up around him.The steps emptied into a winding street filled with market stalls hung with baskets and brass pots that glinted like gold in a shaft of early-evening sunlight.The driver of a green van laid on his horn, its brakes screeching as the man in the blue windbreaker darted across in front of him.Jax ducked around behind the van, his gaze on the dark mouth of an alley opening up on the far side of the street.The killer bolted down it, Jax twenty steps behind [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]