Chapter 38

6 hours later I sighed a breath of relief as we walked into the cabin on the beach. I felt mentally exhausted but not tired and felt that I needed to somehow get rid of the tension that I was feeling.

"Fancy a run Steph?"

Looking at Ethan I nodded my head and went to get changed. I'd never ran with Ethan before and did my best to keep up a fast pace. After running down the beach on the firm sand by the edge of the water I was beginning to feel better. The sound of my feet on the sand and the feel of my heart beating seemed to wash everything out of my head until my only focus was on running. Of course, as we approached the cabin, I sprinted but didn't have a chance of beating Ethan. He was sat in the waves when I finally caught up to him so sat down next to him, trying to get my breathing under control.

"I needed that"

I said as a way to maybe thank him for asking me to join him.

"You've had a very stressful few days. It gets to you, the tension, so sometimes you need to work it out of your body and mind"

"Is that what you do?"

I knew that Ranger sometimes used to take time out in the gym, but I'd never thought about why he did that.

"Yeah. Running or punching something. I suppose it helps to get me back in balance otherwise I feel like a coil ready to spring. Are you feeling better?"

I nodded my head but didn't say anything wondering how Ethan knew how I'd felt, or was I that easy to read? It was weird, like an adrenaline rush without the crash, an anticipation for something about to happen. I didn't know how else to describe it and whilst the exercise of running had helped, I knew that I needed to do something else. What I wasn't too sure.

"Coconuts"

Had me looking at Ethan as though he were mad.

"When I get stressed out, I like to shoot things. We can shoot coconuts and imagine they're the faces of people we don't like very much"

I wasn't sure what to say to that and whilst we'd all carried guns at one time or another, I didn't want to let on to Ethan that I really hated them. The weird thing was that I had fun. It was so much easier to hit a coconut than when a real person was stood in front of you. And weird as may it sound, looking at a coconut I didn't want or need to imagine that it was someone's face. My aim was damn good as I shot the shit out of coconuts.

As we were walking back to the cabin Ethan brought me back to reality.

"You can take some time to relax for a couple of days but then we need to tackle that second EMP"

I knew we had two left to disarm, but Ellie wanted to tackle the second one. The third one would take some working out because of its location. Once back at the cabin and after showering and dressing in suitable attire for a day on the beach I grabbed a book, a bottle of water and headed for one of the loungers.

After twenty minutes I had read one page several times and had no idea what the book was about. I couldn't concentrate on just being sat reading because I felt I really needed to be doing something important. If I stopped moving forward, I was afraid the memories would start to drag me down. Especially those images of those women that we had found. I knew that I was being illogical, and I knew that we'd saved Lilian but no amount of me telling myself that helped. I reasoned that our last job to get Aida back to her mother had been totally successful but even then, doubts flooded through my mind. The whole charade of being in that café and being saved by Corbino didn't sit well with me, even though Lizbeth was sure that it was the taxi driver who had set us up. Was it me and how I always managed to land myself in trouble? I wasn't sure if that was why I felt that I needed to do something constructive.

By afternoon I was sat on the porch with a laptop in front of me. I'd gone over the plans that involved Ellie and felt confident that she shouldn't have any problems. Her and Stanley were leaving in two days to travel up to Washington.

I was thinking through why those targets had been chosen, what was the motive for where they'd been placed. Okay, New York would have taken out the financial district, Wall Street, the largest stock exchanges, the largest financial firms in the world. As the trading hub of the world's biggest economy, disabling the computer systems within those buildings could have an enduring impact not just on the American economy, but also on the global one. The problem that I was having with that scenario was that I was pretty sure that after 911 precautions would have been put into place to avoid an attack.

The second target was the Pentagon Metrorail Station which had the obvious target of the Pentagon. The headquarters of the United States Department of Defence, okay the base for all military operations. But what would be achieved by shutting down every electronic system in that building? I'd read that an energetic EMP can temporarily upset or permanently damage electronic equipment by generating high voltage and high current surges with semiconductor components at particularly risk. The effects of damage could range from imperceptible to the eye, to devices literally blowing apart.

The last device which was the one we were struggling to gain access to, was at the FBI buildings, Quantico, in Virginia. A place where records were kept, where people chased high level crimes and where I suppose evidence and reports were kept for convictions.

An EMP could irrevocably destroy data, because the magnetic field, on a disk that is used to set the data, if not maintained, or if it is abruptly or intensely changed, it would wipe out the data. So was that the motive, to wipe out data? Or was there a more insidious reason for Markovic to have chosen those three places? Revenge came to my mind and then espionage or terrorism, but Markovic wanted to come to America so why would he feel the need for revenge? There was definitely an angle that I was missing.

I put the laptop down and went inside the cabin, I was feeling thirsty so found some fresh fruit and some water and was about to go back outside when I remembered about that boat that I'd seen on the Delaware. Ethan had shown me how to clean up the photos and the program to use to look at the boat identification number and also the car plate. I'd completely forgotten about those. Ethan was going to try and find who that man was from the photo of his face so maybe I needed to find out if anything had come up.

Going back outside, back to my laptop, the first thing that I did was to enter the two numbers into the app and then left it to do its magic. The second thing to do was to find Ethan. I knew that he wasn't in the cabin so hoped that he was somewhere on the beach. The sun was beginning to disappear behind me as I stepped down onto the sand giving a perfect picture of the sand and the sea. Ethan and Ellie were down near to the water, sat on the sand looking out to the ocean. In some ways I didn't want to interrupt them being together, to spoil an intimate moment, but I pushed that thought to the side as I started to walk toward them.

To me, from watching them together, Ethan and Ellie looked to be in love and they both knew it. Of course, that had me thinking about Ranger, asking myself the inevitable question. Were we in love and did we both know it? I knew that I loved Ranger and always would and I had a glimmer of hope from what he had said at the Bat Cave that he loved me. Did he know how much I loved him? I didn't think so. The one and only time I'd ever said it to him was when I'd left him.

"Hey, Steph. What you been up to? We missed you being here on the beach"

I smiled at the greeting from Ellie, since coming here we'd not really had the time together, to talk and chat. I missed it, but now wasn't the moment to reflect on that.

"I, err, was looking at the stuff from that boat I saw"

"Steph, you're meant to be relaxing"

I knew that, but my brain didn't. I just shrugged my shoulders as I sat next to Ellie and looked out at the deep turquoise water.

"Okay. I get it, you're still hyper and can't relax. I couldn't find a match from anything here in the States, so I hacked into the system that records people's faces as they come into the country"

I was suddenly looking at Ethan hoping that he never got caught doing what he did. I mean he was hacking into the fricking Homeland Security.

"Don't worry, they won't even know that I've been in"

I had never thought that the man could be a foreigner, I mean why should I? I looked at Ellie and I think we were suddenly on the same page. Could she have been seen in Serbia when she'd first gone out there, before she was picked up at the airport?

"I didn't recognize him Steph. I mean I know I was nervous going out there. Who wouldn't be, but I'm sure that I would have remembered him"

Ellie was pretty adamant when she said that making me feel almost disappointed with her answer.

Okay maybe it was a feeling, my spidey senses, but I just knew that the man that I'd seen played a bigger part in this. I saw him at that boat and that boat was involved in organ theft. Markovic was desperate for a transplant so had been at the warehouse positive that his estranged daughter would be a prefect donor. Then someone had sent a ransom demand, an exchange, Ellie for the detonator. Could it be that this man was after the detonator? If he was then he would still be looking for it and probably have allies to help him. Had Joe died because I'd left him and disappeared? I knew that he didn't want to find Ellie, and that he wanted me to himself, so had the person who had paid him got so annoyed with him and then decided that he wasn't any use to them anymore? That Joe was a lose end who could identify them? Did that mean that we had people looking for us, wanting that detonator? But why did they need Ellie? Or did they think that she knew the passwords?

"He'll be looking for you and me, Ellie"

I said out loud to myself but true to form I ended up saying it loud enough for Ellie and Ethan to hear me.

"Who Steph?"

I didn't answer because all I was going on were threads and maybe my gut feeling. Not enough to substantiate what I was thinking.

"I'm not sure"

I needed to change the subject before Ellie caught on to what I was thinking because she needed to be focused for what she was going to be doing and not be worried about something that might not exist.

"When are you going to Washington?"

The problem that I was having was figuring out who had placed those EMPs. I'd assumed that it was Markovic but what if it had been someone else? Would they be watching them? I didn't wait for Elaina to reply to my question instead an idea just popped out of my mouth.

"Ellie, how about I do that job in Washington instead of you. You can spend more time with Ethan"

Had I just suggested that? Yeah, I had because I couldn't bare the idea of anything happening to Ellie. I didn't wait for an answer because I wanted them to think through what I'd suggested. I was pretty sure between them they'd talk themselves into doing what I'd suggested.

I should have known something was wrong when we all ended up sat outside after dinner. It wasn't what was being said, it was more the atmosphere that I was feeling.

"Steph, what's worrying you?"

I was looking at Stanley as he asked, wondering why he was asking that.

"Nothing"

I tried to sound confident as I said that, but for some reason it didn't come out anything like I wanted it to.

"Steph, of any of us you have amazing instincts. Something is worrying you, so you need to tell us what it is. We're a team and a team trust each other's judgements"

"I'm not sure, it's just ideas that are floating around"

Shit why did Ethan have to mention that he thought I had good instincts, to say what Ranger had always said to me. I wasn't as confident as the others in voicing those random thoughts because they could change. Having four people just looking at me and not saying anything made me nervous until I couldn't take it anymore.

"Okay, but these are just random thoughts that might make sense now, but tomorrow they could change. I saw that man at the boat and that boat was involved in organ theft. I'd heard at the warehouse how desperate Markovic was for a transplant and that he was positive that you, Ellie, would be a prefect donor. But someone had sent him a ransom demand, an exchange, Ellie for the detonator. So my brain took me to wondering if that man was after the detonator and if he was, then he would still be looking for it and probably have people helping him"

I waited for the laughing to start, for someone to pat me on the back and say, nice idea. When that didn't happen, I was suddenly listening to what Ethan was saying.

"We were told that there was an informer inside the FBI, they might be involved with him. Apparently, the group got a tip that the FBI were watching them and might be ready to do a raid"

That maybe made sense and it could also tie in with the thoughts that I'd had as to why Joe had died. Joe would be able to identify who it was that had given him the cash and told him he had to use me to find Ellie.

"So this man, we need more on him. You're worried that he might be looking for Ellie or you Steph, aren't you?"

I nodded my head to Stanley. The other problem that I was worrying about was what had happened to that laptop that Raynor had taken from Ranger. Had it been the decoy?

"Yeah. I just can't sort out a motive or how he knew about the detonator, or if maybe he knows where those EMPs are"

"So who do we think planted them?"

It was a question that I'd asked myself this afternoon. We'd always assumed that it was Markovic, but I just couldn't figure out how, unless he gave the clients the sculptures and said they were from Markovic's company.

"We just assumed it was Markovic, Lizbeth, that he gave clients a sculpture"

"It doesn't make sense. Markovic had the design and he obviously built them, probably for the army and maybe some the army didn't know about. How would that man get his hands on the devices?"

Ethan was right, it just didn't make sense unless Markovic knew this man and gave them to him or told him where they were.

"I suggest we postpone Washington until we find out more. Hell, it would almost be poetic if that one blew up"

I was surprised when Ellie seemed to look annoyed at that suggestion, but hell, I was only worried because I didn't want anything to happen to her.I suppose Stanley was right, the one that would cause the most damage to the public and the country was safe, but it still didn't give me any more ideas on what the motive was and that was beginning to bug me. Why the Pentagon and the FBI offices?

"Can't we send an anonymous tip to someone and tell them about those damn EMPs?"

I was looking at Lizbeth wondering why we hadn't thought about doing that before, it would save us a lot of trouble. Looking at the others I was sure that Ellie thought that it was worth considering but Ethan and Stanley didn't look as keen.

"You don't agree do you? Why not?"

I asked feeling my spirits fall as fast as they had risen.

"The problem would be that they would see us as responsible for them and we'd end up locked up for years"

"They wouldn't know that it was us"

I totally agreed with Ellie as she said that, but I could understand why Ethan was against the idea. Everyone would be looking for us and would have a hell of a lot more resources than we could ever have.

"They'd hunt us down with everything that they had and eventually they'd find out who we were. They wouldn't care if we were trying to help, they'd see us as the bad guys"

In other words, terrorists and no way did I want that happening. Hell, if we were caught, I dreaded to think what they'd do us. Probably lock us up and throw away the key. We were back to where we were before.

"Let's postpone trying to disarm those last two devices and work at finding out who that man is. He may have no interest in Petco's work and simply be the one who was running the organ theft. If that's the case, then we can go back to our original plan. I'm going to head back up to the States and catch up with some old friends and see what I can find out"

I wasn't sure what Stanley could achieve from doing that, but Lizbeth had said he was a hell of an investigator and had contacts all over the place from the army and from when he travelled around. I was hoping that we'd get some leads from those photos.

Everyone was quiet after that meeting. We discussed what each one of us could do the next day and then did our thing. Elaina and Ethan disappeared down to the bar while Lizbeth decided she needed a shower and sleep. Me? Yeah, you guessed, I was back with my companion, my laptop.

Ethan would be trying to identify the man from his face while Ellie was following up on the boat and car, including any exchange of money that she could follow. Lizbeth was going to be looking at Markovic since he'd come to America and any business partners or clients that he had worked with. I was going to try to unravel his life as Damir Markovic.

Seeing as I knew very little about Markovic, other than what people had told me, I wanted to get to the know the man from when he was born and all of the people that he'd had any contact with, including any family.

I was starting at the beginning, from when he'd been born. To do that I felt that I needed to know what had been happening in that area of the world so began by giving myself a history lesson. That whole area had once been known as Yugoslavia and encompassed a variety of ethnic groups within its border, a border dictated after World War 11. Under Tito some historians criticized his presidency as authoritarian, while others saw him as a benevolent dictator. He was a popular public figure both in Yugoslavia and abroad. Twelve years after his death, as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia dissolved and descended into civil war.

There were calls for more autonomy within Yugoslavia by nationalist groups led in 1991, to declarations of independence in Croatia and Slovenia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army lashed out, first in Slovenia and then in Croatia. Thousands were killed in the latter conflict which was paused in 1992 under an UN-monitored ceasefire.

Bosnia, with a complex mix of Serbs, Muslims and Croats, was next to try for independence. Bosnia's Serbs, backed by Serbs elsewhere in Yugoslavia, resisted. Under leader Radovan Karadzic, they threatened bloodshed if Bosnia's Muslims and Croats, who outnumbered the Serbs, broke away. Despite European blessing for the move in a 1992 referendum, war came fast.

Yugoslav army units, withdrawn from Croatia and renamed the Bosnian Serb Army, carved out a huge swathe of Serb-dominated territory. Over a million Bosnian Muslims and Croats were driven from their homes in ethnic cleansing. Serbs suffered too. The capital Sarajevo was besieged and shelled. UN peacekeepers, brought in to quell the fighting, were seen as ineffective.

International peace efforts to stop the war failed and the UN was humiliated when over 100,000 people died. The war ended in 1995 after Nato bombed the Bosnian Serbs, and Muslim and Croat armies made gains on the ground. A US-brokered peace divided Bosnia into two self-governing entities, a Bosnian Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation lightly bound by a central government.

In August 1995, the Croatian army stormed areas in Croatia under Serb control prompting thousands to flee. Soon Croatia and Bosnia were fully independent. Slovenia and Macedonia had already gone. Montenegro left later. In 1999, Kosovo's ethnic Albanians fought Serbs in another brutal war to gain independence. Serbia ended the conflict beaten, battered and alone.

On December 14, 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed in Paris, officially ending the Bosnian War — the bloodiest interethnic conflict in Europe since World War II, which saw about 100,000 people killed between 1992 and 1995

Markovic had been born in 1971, 9 years after Tito died but would have been in his late teens when the troubles had started, so officially he'd been born in Yugoslavia. The problem was which country would that have been in, and would there be any records anywhere? The name Markovic was a common family name in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Austria and Serbia, so that didn't help.

I was pretty sure that Markovic would had gone to university somewhere, so I started to look for a university that was offering physics during the time period 1989 to 1993. With the civil wars going on a lot of the universities in the old Yugoslavia were struggling. Fighting didn't help and the economy everywhere took a blow, meaning that there was no funding. An article that I found wrote that any budding scientists were encouraged to attend university here in America or in Russia. I was pretty certain that had Markovic attended a university here then he would have stayed, which left me looking for suitable Russian universities and the courses that they had offered at the time. There was only one that fit the bill, Moscow State University, Oblast, Russia.

I didn't sleep much for next few days. Okay, I maybe dozed as the laptop did the searches that I'd asked of it. A couple of mornings I woke up on my bed having absolutely no recollection of how I got there. That was when I was definitely ganged up on. Ellie led the telling off that I got, but the other two were stood right behind her nodding their heads.

From then on, I had to spend two hours every morning doing some sort of exercise and two in the late afternoon practicing at a gym on their pole. Hell, I even worked at killing coconuts to try and tamp down the stressful state I was working myself into from all the time researching. We would spend dinner together followed by us each reporting our progress, keeping everyone in the loop. After two days of doing that, I felt more energized and my mind did seem more nimble, but I wasn't going to tell them that.

Ellie had traced the car to a rental agency based in New York and was trying to follow through with who had actually rented the car. It wasn't our man and the car had been returned the morning after the boat exploded so she was now entrenched in following the money. The boat, well I wasn't surprised when the name and number weren't registered anywhere, but that wasn't stopping Ellie on trying to get a lead on it.

Lizbeth had gone through every employee that Markovic had used in his contracting business and where she could the clients who had used his services. She found nothing that could tie in the man into any business that Markovic had done.

Ethan was becoming very frustrated, it taken him ages to hack into the Homeland Security data but wasn't being very successful at finding a face that matched the one that we had. Maybe he had one hell of a disguise with a false ID, or had he managed to avoid any immigration controls? Ethan suggested he could have sneaked across the border from Mexico or Canada but then threw in the suggestion that he could have been on a ship and then transferred to a smaller boat coming into any port or marina on the eastern coast. That had me considering that that was how cartels and drug dealers always managed to avoid detection.

Me, well I'd discovered that Markovic had been from Bosnia, I'd eventually managed to find a news article provided by the university celebrating the graduation for the year he was in. Sheer luck had him graduating in the top ten, so there was a couple of sentences on him. He'd been lucky to get out of Bosnia when he did, before so many people had died. There were still families who had lost someone, not knowing what had happened to them or where their bodies might be.

It was after my morning exercise when I was able to get back to work. I wanted to chase up the names of maybe his mother or father. I found a site that listed the names of all of those who were never found and scrolled down the list until I came to those starting with M. There were two, a mother and her son. The boy had been 11 years old at the time, making him 39 if he'd survived. Emir Markovic piqued my senses and curiosity. What if he hadn't died but only disappeared. It couldn't have been easy being a child on their own, basically living off the streets.

Of course, a search for him came up blank, just as I expected. I remembered the thoughts that I'd had earlier, about how organizations always managed to be able to transport drugs and people without the authorities catching them. It was back to internet research and finding out where these illegal groups focused and maybe who were the bosses. My interest was caught by one article who'd reported that mafia groups from neighboring countries, particularly Serbia and Croatia, often based their operations in Sarajevo, due to its proximity to Bosnia.

It seemed that the empire of organized criminals employed a more contemporary incentive, the profit motive, for enterprises such as smuggling and selling narcotics, trafficking women for sex, and moving contraband goods across frontiers. Compulsion was also employed, whether it was various grades of blackmail, or even murder. The criminal empire had risen to become the largest industry in the region. It was regulated not by traditional power structures, but by a multi-ethnic network of bosses, transporters, dealers, and enforcers. Its tools were cell-phones, big trucks, vans, buses, fast cars, and boats. The grease for its machinery consisted of bribes. The organized crime was also so successful because of willing partners in the police, customs, border guards, judiciary and, ultimately, the political class.

Luka Bojović, was one of the Croatian bosses who looked to have a lot of control in Bosnia. Because of how he delegated the work to men below him it tended to be them who caught the eye of the police and with no evidence to point a finger at Bojović he was still managing his empire. I went back to the program that searched through news articles and input Luka Bojović, wondering what a man like him would look like.

He reminded me of the Mafia bosses that we had around Trenton. Older men with an entourage of bodyguards, but I suddenly lost interest in Bojović because there, stood to one side was a man who looked like a younger version of the man we were looking for, right down to the tattoo that was showing above his collar. The name that he was using was Emir Marko Lukavic. I sent a copy of the photo to the printer inside the cabin and then decided to run a search on Emir Marko Lukavic. I left that to run and went inside, I was so excited to tell the others what I'd found out. Ellie and Ethan were in the main room, so I assumed that Lizbeth was working in her bedroom. Grabbing the sheet from the printer I dropped onto the couch and just looked at the two of them. It took a few minutes but eventually they realized that I was still there.

"I found him"

I blurted out holding the paper in my hands.

"You did, who is he?"

"Emir Marko Lukavic"

I handed the paper over to Ellie for her to look at while Ethan read it over her shoulder.

"Who exactly is he Steph?"

Ellie had stood up, heading over to the kitchen as Ethan continued to look at the paper so I started to explain to him what I'd discovered.

"Damir Markovic's younger brother. Markovic went to Moscow to university before the fighting really began so I assume his parents and younger brother stayed in Bosnia, possibly Sarajevo. There's no . . . "

I stopped talking mid sentence because a very loud bleeping noise suddenly started up. I had no idea what the hell it was, but it seemed that Ethan did. He was so keen to get to the large computer that acted as our server that I nearly ended up on the floor as he pushed past me.

"Shit, someone's doing a trace on us"