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  also by OTHO ESKIN

  The Reflecting Pool

  Copyright © 2021 by Otho Eskin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names of real government agencies, cities, and countries are used, but the characters, their action and dialogue are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-462-2

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Sarasota, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Neal, Edward, Katherine, and David

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my literary agent, Judith Ehrlich, for her invaluable advice and creative guidance during the course of writing this novel; the late Richard Merek for his insightful suggestions on an early draft; and Ed Stackler for his careful review of a later draft. Thanks also to Erica Ferguson for her excellent proofing suggestions; my personal support team—Judith Ehrlich, Erin Bradford, and Ludovica Villar Hauser—who ably assisted with pre-publication work; and my publishers, Pat and Bob Gussin and the rest of the Oceanview team for their fine support. A belated thanks to Ludovica Villar-Hauser and the staff at Parity Productions for producing a wonderful Zoom launch for the first Marko Zorn novel. And, finally, my heartfelt gratitude to Therese, who kept me going throughout the writing of this book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE WOOD PANEL explodes above my head, and I drop to the ground and lie pressed against the wet stone steps, sucking in oxygen, my heart pounding, my arteries pumped with adrenaline. I want to scramble to my feet and make a run for it, but I force myself to stay motionless. Here, I’m hidden by the yew trees and shrubs in my front yard. Standing, I’m an easy target.

  My face is a few inches from my copy of The Washington Post in its plastic wrapper to protect it from the rain. Another giveaway I hadn’t yet returned home from police headquarters. I must do something about that problem in the future.

  Assuming I have a future.

  I’d parked my car in front of my house rather than in my garage, where it would normally be tucked away. It’s a 1964, fire-engine-red Corvette convertible. That might as well be a billboard advertisement: This is where Marko Zorn lives. Come and get me. I’m an idiot.

  This is a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes, most built in the 1920s, with large yards and wide front porches where people once sat and drank iced tea on warm days. It’s a typical Friday early-spring evening and my neighbors are at home from work, drinking martinis, and watching the evening news. The TV screens flicker dimly behind drawn curtains. It’s twilight and beginning to rain. No one was on the porches or in the street when I arrived. No one is watching my house.

  Except, of course, someone is watching.

  He must be hidden behind one of the cars parked across the street or maybe he’s in Mrs. Euler’s garden, crouched among the red rambler roses, waiting for me, waiting for me to open my front door, waiting for me to give him a clear shot. How could I have not spotted him? I must be getting sloppy.

  The shooter now has a problem: Did he see me duck to pick up my newspaper just as he pulled the trigger? He has to be certain he’s made a kill; otherwise he won’t be paid. That means he must leave his hiding place and cross the street and, to do that, he must show himself.

  I figure I have maybe twenty seconds before my killer walks up the path to my house to finish me off. I grope in my pocket for my cell phone—the only weapon I have on me. In the dimness, I can’t make out the buttons that control my home security system, so I punch randomly and the lights in the house are suddenly ablaze. The light in one of the bedrooms flashes on, then off; the exterior security lights flood my front lawn illuminating me as well. I kill the floodlights and push more buttons until one activates the shrieking burglar alarm. I think I may even have turned on my kitchen toaster oven. I switch the lights off, then on, then off again, turning my street into a kind of demented amusement park filled with the sound of barking dogs.

  I hit the panic alarm on the ignition key fob of my Corvette, and the air shivers with a blaring new siren that harmonizes with the burglar alarm. I remotely key the Corvette’s ignition and activate the car’s entertainment system. Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria bursts into the twilight: very pretty but not quite the effect I was hoping for, so I switch to another channel and land on a rock station and pump the volume up to maximum.

  Perfect.

  I call 911 and report a “disturbance in progress” on my street, having to yell to make myself heard above the noise. I identify myself as a police officer and give my address.

  In minutes, my crankier neighbors switch on their porch lights and emerge from their homes to find out what’s happened to their peaceful neighborhood. They stand on their porches and stare in awe at my house as it flashes on and off to the sound of what seems to be mariachi hip-hop.

  The sound of a new siren shatters what’s left of the neighborhood peace. A police cruiser, lights flashing, swings around the corner at the end of my block, stops in front of my house, and two uniformed cops emerge. Time, I decide, to end the sound-and-light show. The street goes dark: the rock and roll stops; the barking dogs fall silent.

  My phone rings, and when I pick up, a gravelly baritone announces: “We must talk. Ten o’clock. The usual place.”

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something just now,” I say. “Can it wait until tomorrow?”

  “It can’t wait.” The phone connection is cut. He never stays on the line more than a few seconds in case his phone calls are being traced. Which they certainly must be by any number of hostile organizations—public and private.

  Two uniformed DC police officers appear from behind my azalea bushes and look down at me.

  “Show us your ID,” says one cop.

  “Marko Zorn, Metropolitan Police, Homicide.” I get to my feet, slipping the phone into my pocket. I move as nonchalantly and as inconspicuously as I can to stand between the two cops and my front door. I don’t want them to see the hole in the wood panel and ask questions about what happened. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, but for the moment I don’t want to have to explain that a few minutes ago somebody tried to kill me using a high-powered rifle. I don’t need that event showing up in the official incident report drawing the attention of the chief of police and maybe even Internal Affairs. I don’t know what happened this evening, but I’m sure I need to find out who’s trying to kill me before it becomes part of my record.

  My name must mean something to one of the cops. I don’t recognize him, but I can tell he sort of recognizes me but is unsure from where—maybe from some police department holiday party, maybe from a photo array.

  “Is this your house?” the other cop asks.

  “Sure is.” I hand him my ID.

  The second cop examines my police shield and ID in the dim light and writes my name and police ID number in his notebook. “Are you responsible for this disturbance?”

  “I just had a new home-security system installed, and it must have blown out.”

  The cops look skeptical. “You better have that system checked,” one says. “You don’t want this to happen again.”

  When the cops return to their police cruiser, I examine my front door. There’s a hole the size of my fist in one of its wooden panels. If it weren’t for the steel plates I’d installed, the round woul
d have gone clean through the door.

  My neighbors give me dirty looks as I cross the street and walk along the opposite sidewalk, searching among the wet leaves. I stand for a moment, looking across the street at my house, trying to imagine just how the shooter must have seen me, parking my Corvette, walking up the path, stooping down to pick up The Washington Post newspaper the delivery guy left this morning after I’d gone to work.

  How long, I wonder, had the shooter been waiting for me to show up? It can’t have been long. A man with a rifle, almost certainly equipped with a silencer, would draw a lot of attention in our bucolic neighborhood. That means the shooter must have arrived just before I did and taken up his position, and that means he must have been following me. I change my times and routes day to day for just this reason: to avoid unpleasant surprises. Somebody is tracking me. I decide that speculating about this any further is a pointless waste of my time, and I continue my search.

  Using my handkerchief, I pick up a large brass shell casing I find in the gutter among the wet leaves—a rifle round. This I slip into my pocket.

  The neighborhood has returned to its normal peacefulness; a single dog a few blocks away is still barking: it hasn’t gotten the message the party’s over. When I finally go into my house, I make sure that all security systems, including the multiple motion sensors, are operating as they should. They are, but I retrieve my .45 automatic I keep in my bedside table. Just in case.

  I pour myself a glass of Elijah Craig bourbon to calm my nerves, turn on a recording of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and try not to think about the man with a rifle waiting for me across the street.

  I consider not going to the meeting I was summoned to. But that would only provoke Cyprian Voss into sending some of his goons to drag me there across town. I’ve already had enough adventure for one day, and that would injure my dignity. I decide to go peaceably.

  At that moment, as I’m soon to learn, the great actress takes a revolver from its bracket on the wall strides across the stage to the drawing room door, where she stops, turns, and says, her voice in a trembling rage: “You are evil and your evil will be exposed this night.” She steps into the drawing room, closing the door behind her. At 9:42, someone puts a bullet through her head.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHEN WE MEET it’s always at the same place: a small, slightly seedy, Thai restaurant. Cyprian Voss has a weakness for Thai food; someone once told me this goes back to when Voss was involved in a covert action in some war. I don’t know which war or on which side: probably both.

  A sign on the restaurant door reads “CLOSED”. Two men stand on either side: one is Raul; the other, Horst. There will be two more like them guarding the back door, and a fifth one in the kitchen, testing the food.

  The dining room is deserted. A pale light from behind the bar shows me the way to a door at the back of the room. I step inside.

  A huge man sits at a table. He wears a dark, double-breasted suit, partially covered this evening by a napkin tucked into his collar. His snow-white hair hangs to his shoulders. He raises his large head and smiles at me. At least I think it’s me he smiles at; Cyprian Voss is wall-eyed, so he seems to be looking at two things at once. We do not shake hands: he detests being touched.

  “Mr. Zorn,” the man booms jovially. “Good of you to join me. Forgive me for not getting up. It’s hard for me to stand; it’s the humidity; it affects my joints.”

  “You can’t stand up because you’re too fat.”

  “That’s uncalled for, my boy.” He smiles and wipes his wet, pink lips with his napkin. I try to gauge the man’s mood. He can be friendly, or he can be deadly. I look for a tell but can’t read him.

  The table is covered with dishes of food. I smell spiced shrimp soup and pad thai fried noodles. The man eats a large spoonful of fried rice, some of the grains falling to the table.

  “You look distracted, dear boy.”

  “Someone just tried to kill me. I want to know who.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you there.” He laughs mirthlessly. Something he does when he’s lying. He scoops a large helping of khao phat kai onto his plate.

  I have to be careful: like all wild animals, if Voss senses fear or weakness, he’ll attack.

  “If you go on eating like this,” I say, “it will kill you.”

  “Or one of my many enemies will kill me. Or maybe one of my friends: it might even be you, Mr. Zorn.” He smiles at me. “We have an assignment for you.”

  I’ve worked on the side for Cyprian Voss for several years but I know nothing about who he really is, who he works for, or who controls the large sums of money he pays me and others like me. I’m pretty sure he represents a consortium of wealthy men involved in banking, manufacturing, and mining. As far as I can tell, their immediate political aim is to stop Russia from reclaiming the power and territories it lost at the end of the Cold War. What other aims they may have, I don’t want to know.

  “Do I have to remind you,” I say, “that in addition to dealing with whoever tried to kill me tonight, I have a full-time job as a homicide detective in the Washington, DC, police? At the moment I have half a dozen open cases.”

  “This entire assignment will take only a few days.”

  “I need to get rid of the man who tried to shoot me, whoever he is.”

  Voss waves away my protest. “You are capable of doing two things at once, as you recently demonstrated when you prevented the assassination of the President of the United States, neutralized a domestic terrorist group, and, at the same time, managed to rid Washington of some of its worst gangsters. Very neatly done, sir: I compliment you. I won’t ask how you managed that.”

  Good. Some things are better left unexplained. Voss knows I’m a senior detective with contacts and sources among law enforcement and intelligence agencies and among those on the other side of the law. Voss is happy to take advantage of these sources, not to mention my unorthodox way of getting results. But we have an unspoken understanding: Voss knows I have a strict personal ethical code, and he never asks me to do a job that violates that code. He has others on his payroll for that kind of thing.

  “Did you not hear me?” I say. “Somebody tried to put a bullet through my head.”

  “I did, but this assignment is important.”

  “So is my head.”

  “Nina Voychek is the prime minister of the Republic of Montenegro,” Voss goes on as if I’d said nothing. “She’s arriving in the United States this Sunday evening. Someone plans to kill the lady. Your assignment: see that doesn’t happen. I am informed the lady in question is young and quite beautiful. That should appeal to you.”

  This makes no sense. Why is Voss asking me to babysit some visiting dignitary from somewhere in the Balkans? I’m not a trained bodyguard. That’s not my business. This woman will have her own security team plus whatever security the US government provides. This doesn’t add up.

  “I’m not a bodyguard,” I say.

  “You have other talents.”

  What is he not telling me? I’ve worked long enough for Voss to know when he’s lying. I feel sure there’s a lot more to this assignment than he’s telling me.

  “You could hire any number of professionals; there are plenty of former Special Forces types around DC looking for a paycheck and some action.”

  “This assignment requires nimbleness and a certain delicacy.” Voss shovels a heaping spoonful of fried rice and chicken into his mouth and chews reflectively for a moment. “For years, Nina Voychek was the leader of the democratic opposition to the Russian-backed gangsters running her country,” he says at last.

  “Good for her. I don’t know the lady; I’m not sure I know how to pronounce her name. Get someone else.”

  Voss ignores my protest. “Mykhayl Drach was, until recently, the ruler of Montenegro and on the payroll of Vladimir Putin.”

  The name Mykhayl Drach gets my full attention.

  “Drach’s government was recently overthrown in
a popular uprising led by Nina Voychek. Mykhayl Drach escaped from Montenegro,” Voss continues. “Two weeks ago he was located in Chicago.”

  “I know: I located him.”

  Voss dabs his lips with his napkin. “I sent you to Chicago to carry out a routine extraction with instructions to turn the man over to the International Court of Justice for a trial for crimes against humanity. You were not supposed to instigate an international, high-profile riot.”

  I don’t like to be reminded about that Chicago business; what happened there still gives me nightmares. “I can’t take this assignment.”

  “I’m afraid I must insist. If you refuse, that would leave me no choice but to take drastic action.”

  I feel my pulse speed up. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Threatening? Of course not.”

  “I don’t care to be threatened: By you; by anybody. Threats to me usually end badly. For everybody.”

  Voss pushes himself slowly to his feet. “If you’ll forgive me, I must excuse myself for a moment. My bladder isn’t what it used to be. Take time to consider your answer, Mr. Zorn. Consider most carefully.”

  I hate to admit it, but Voss is right about one thing: I did screw up in Chicago. I should have known what would happen when I met those three old men from the émigré organization who told me how they’d lost their parents, brothers, and sisters—children even—slaughtered by Drach’s militias: whole villages razed and burned. I should have known what would happen when I saw the rage in their eyes.

  That doesn’t answer my question: why me? I figure I have a couple of minutes before Voss returns, so I do a search on my cell phone for Nina Voychek. According to a potted biography, she was born in a small mountain village in Montenegro, studied law at the university in the country’s capital, and spent three years in the United States at Columbia to study international relations. On her return to Montenegro, she became a political activist in the resistance movement in opposition to the Drach regime.