Thanks to notsing for your review! Yes, some sort of Don-anger will come later in the story (at least the thoughts you described in your review), but I thought that right now Don would be too (pre-)occupied to reproach Charlie.
...and thanks to everyone who is still reading this :)
27 – CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN – 1,130^27
While researching all they could on the transporter, they were also looking for it. Larry and Amita applied themselves to writing an algorithm in order to help them look at the satellite pictures, searching for the vehicle.
The two teams and Megan had also been making inquiries about the dealer who had sold the car, but had found nothing. The car's buyer had either gone underground or used a false name; in any case there was no address for him, nor a social security number or any other documents. The man didn't exist.
However, they now had an exact description of the vehicle – at least they hoped so, praying fervently that the mafia hadn't changed the plates.
Hope.
Actually, it was grotesque that one simple witness statement had brought back to all of them the zeal they had lost in the course of the previous investigations. They had a clue a real clue! And it would lead them directly and within a short time to Charlie, that was certain.
Half an hour later, the moment had come. O'Connagh waved the agents of his unit to come to him. He had just received a call from Granger. "James, we've got the transporter. David and I are at the address Amita and Larry gave us and the vehicle's still there. The description fits. However, it's no KIA, but a Mercedes-Benz M-Class, but the plate is correct. It's standing in front of a run-down apartment house.
"Okay Granger, you won't interfere and you'll keep us up to date in case anything changes. Alright?"
"Alright."
With new determination O'Connagh turned around to face Don and the others. "What are we waiting for?"
0 – 0 – 0
Ivanov folded his mobile shut. "That was the boss," he informed his three colleagues. "He wants us to come to head-quarters in an hour; he wants to hold a meeting of how things are going to proceed. And... Boris?" He spoke to Chrushtchov. "After that the two of us will have a nice chat with the professor. We don't want him to die of thirst, do we?"
Chrushtchov nodded deliberately. "Depending on how the next days are gonna be we should maybe look for another hiding-place for him." He smiled nastily. "Who knows, we might still need him alive at sometime."
"Where did you take him to?" Rurik Petrov wanted to know, but Ivanov shook his head.
"The less you know, the better."
"Yeah. For you," the fourth voice in the room cynically intervened.
Ivanov didn't seem to be the least bit ashamed of the fact that his colleague Oleg Borisov had seen through his plans. He just grinned. "You know, it's every man for himself and the Devil takes the rest."
"But I also know the one about honor among thieves."
Ivanov laughed. "Don't worry. Not one of us would ever betray each other. Everyone knows that can be very damaging to your health."
"Anyway," Petrov changed the subject. "In any case we should gradually start to collect the documents if we're supposed to be with the boss in an hour."
He rose, but he never reached the neighboring room. Before he had even reached the threshold, the apartment door banged open and FBI agents rushed in their weapons drawn.
"Kitchen safe!" one of them shouted.
In the next instant a woman's loud voice shouted out, "Bathroom safe!"
At the same time, agents rushed into the room, pointing their weapons at them. "FBI! Hands behind your heads! Everyone! I want to see your hands!"
Still too confused to think about rebelling, the four criminals obeyed the order. "Alright! Now turn around, all of you, faces to the wall!" The agent shouted louder as if the level of sound in the room was rising.
A few instants later, their arms were pulled down roughly and they were cuffed.
"Where is the hostage?" the agent with the volume problem shouted in Petrov's ear. "Where's my brother?"
Petrov had by now regained his capacity to talk even though mentally he still wasn't able to perform to the maximum; his head was just whirling too much. It was therefore wise to first pretend being ignorant. "Whatya talkin' about, man?"
His arms were pulled harder and a voice hissed into his ear, "I know that you've got him, and if you've so much as touched a hair on his head, then God help you!"
Petrov maintained his cool facade, but was nevertheless relieved when the agent was addressed and thereby distracted from him. "Don, he's not here. The apartment's empty."
The shouting agent pushed Petrov away from him so that he stumbled some steps forward before he was again taken into custody by another. Before he was led away, he could still see and hear how the agent punched furiously against the walls.
0 – 0 – 0
"Give in, Don. He's not here." Colby stood in the door that led to one of the bedrooms, watching a bit helplessly as his friend and boss searched the apartment for a second time. He tore doors open, looked under the beds, the couch, in the cupboards. But there was no trace of Charlie.
He would have given quite a lot if Megan had been here right now, but instead of having pinned all their hopes onto this operation here where she couldn't have participated anyway, she had stayed at head quarters. And Vicky Lomersdale, the woman from O'Connagh's team didn't know Don well enough for a sensitive talk. And David had made himself scarce. So it really seemed to fall onto Colby.
"Don –"
Since Colby didn't know what he could say it was maybe quite good that Don cut him off. "Is there a cellar to this apartment?" he asked with feverish nervousness. "Is there a cellar here!" he repeated, already much louder when Colby didn't answer him at once.
"I don't know, maybe," he now said, a bit stunned, and before he could think about what to say next, Don had already rushed past him, out of the room.
Five minutes later, the janitor led them into the basement of the apartment house. Apart from the room holding the boiler it was split up by wooden gratings, reminded Don uncomfortably of cages. His tension was rising. Maybe he was here somewhere... for sure...
"Charlie?"
The door to the little cellar compartment was opened and he stepped in.
"Charlie!"
He looked around, looked in every corner, pushed boxes aside.
"Charlie, you're here somewhere?"
It was no use. There were no possibilities here to hide a grown person. Charlie wasn't here.
0 – 0 – 0
He wasn't even startled when it began anew. By now he had a routine concerning the regularly occurring floods that nearly made him more afraid than the rising water itself. This was the fourth one; it therefore had to be Tuesday evening.
He was cold. He had already detected that he was coughing more often and that mucus seemed to be collecting in his lungs. The two days in this damp hole couldn't have been good for his health – in addition to a broken kneecap.
He pulled his left leg closer towards his body and wrapped his arms around it. That was all he could do to keep himself warm, especially now when the water was returning.
He was barefoot. Since the second flood he had always taken off his shoes and socks so that he could keep at least the latter dry and put them on again after the flood. That way he managed to keep his feet warm if only a little bit.
Not for the first time, images of his home appeared in front of him in the darkness – warm light falling upon the comfortable sofa in the living room of the Craftsman, the dark dining table on which so often stood home cooked warm meals, something to drink; he could see pictures of his father coming out of the kitchen, of Don coming in through the front door, Amita cuddling up to him on the couch... He thought he could feel her body against his, and the warmth penetrated through him and reached his heart. Though at the same time he could feel in that very heart an ache, and then there was this terrible feeling in his stomach... He wanted to be with them, he wanted to be home, sheltered, safe. He was longing so much for home that the mental pain even surpassed the one in his knee, and he fought himself back to the brutal truth.
He noticed nearly immediately that he was shivering again. The warmth was gone, the pain in his knee was making itself present again. However, with the images of the beloved people and places in his life, his inside ache had also gone. Still Charlie didn't know if this had been a good exchange. None of the two options appeared to him more favorable than the other.
His thoughts returned to his surroundings. He was aware that his condition was constantly growing worse as more time passed. They will find me sooner or later, won't they? For if not...
When he shuddered once more, he let go of all reservations and retreated again into the warm thoughts of his home.
0 – 0 – 0
"How could that have happened?" The mafia-boss' powerful voice echoed from the walls with thundering noise. The two newcomers had to pull themselves together in order not to flinch. Even though they were merely witnesses to the things that had happened and no way immediately involved, the boss seemed in an irrational way a bit intimidating. But maybe that was only because he could in the blink of an eye order someone to kill you.
Andrushov and Raskolnitov, the two mobsters that had just arrived, had had to make some purchases and had thus passed one of their hiding-places when, to their shock, they had seen FBI agents bustling about everywhere. Afterwards they hadn't had difficulties in finding out that four of their accomplices had been arrested. However, the major problem was their boss who didn't like to hear that sort of news at all.
He took his inferiors' embarrassed silence as a reason to continue yelling at them. "How silly are you actually? Could you maybe tell me how we're now supposed to get the List?"
"It's not our fault, Bolshoyov," Andrushov said calmly, at least on the outside. "We're not responsible for them letting themselves be seen."
Though indignant about Andrushov's provocative tone, the boss inhaled deeply. "Alright. What do we have now?" A bit placated, he detected that his voice sounded just as calm as Andrushov's.
"We've still got the plans and beyond that everything is already settled for the operation. It's just that Ivanov, our hacker, is now missing. But for that we've got the professor."
"And he's where?"
Andrushov shrugged his shoulders. "That's something only Ivanov and Chrushtchov know. And they're being held at head quarters right now. Ilya knew a hiding-place, but he didn't tell me which. Maybe it's also one of the places we know."
That was bad luck. If they had at least known where the professor was, they could probably have made him hack into the security program for them. They could be very convincing. "So we can only hope that Ivanov is going to play his winning card at the right moment. And that he gets Chrushtchov and the other two with him out."
"And what are we going to do with the professor?"
The boss snorted impatiently. "What are we going to do? The two of them are likely to have made certain he can't escape. And we've got more important things to do now. Each team is going once more through its part and tomorrow at the same time we're meeting here piecing together everything. As soon as the others are with us again, we're going to strike. Budanov says the others aren't ready yet either; moreover we'll try to prevent them from stealing the march on us."
Andrushov didn't let himself be distracted. "Boss, what if the professor dies, wherever the two of them have taken him? We don't know how long the FBI is going to negotiate with them or if they're going to do so in the first place rather than just interrogate them. And if Ilya and Boris don't have a means of exerting pressure anymore –"
"Relax, Sasha. Forget this math-guy. It's completely irrelevant what will happen to him. As a means of exerting pressure, it doesn't matter what his condition is. How should the Feds know if he's alive or not?"
0 – 0 – 0
With his lips closed tightly and his gaze steady, Don watched Colby and David interrogate Ivanov from the observation room. The initially nearly unbearable pain that he hadn't found Charlie had subsided and given way to grim determination. Two hours had passed since the arrest, and they still hadn't been able to get anything out of any of the mobsters. It wouldn't stay like this, though. At some point in time, everyone broke.
With an unwavering gaze, Don stared through the mirror at Ivanov. His hands were clenched to fists. This bastard had probably kidnapped Charlie and he wasn't telling them anything. He had also watched the interrogations with the other mobsters. He had searched for some sort of signal the suspects would in one way or another give themselves away, though they hadn't found anything anywhere. He paid particular attention to Ivanov, it was he they had a description of; what was missing was only the final proof.
No surprise they hadn't found them at first. They had been concentrating upon the branch-mafia's members; after all they had threatened Charlie already once – no, Don corrected himself, twice. However, Larry and Amita had told them that according to Charlie's analysis, three of the four men belonged to the big mafia, and it was likely that this was also the case with the fourth one, Rurik Petrov.
"Where is Professor Charles Eppes?" David leaned over the table, closer to Ivanov.
Since they guessed that the mobster was more unscrupulous than most criminals, they had renounced from the beginning on the good-cop-bad-cop game and had immediately tried the bad and the very bad cop. However, without success up until now. Ivanov wasn't talking. Even worse: he was mocking them.
"I think you should be interrogating yourselves," he this time countered the question. "No offense, but either there's something wrong with your ears or with your memory."
"Or with your answers, Ivanov!" Colby snapped at him sharply and fit his role totally by hitting his two hands on the table with emphasis. However, he wasn't play acting when he wandered through the interrogation room unnerved.
"We know that you were at the university the day Professor Eppes was abducted. And what might matter to you even more: we even have proof of that." At least with all probability. The student Ivanov had asked for directions Sunday in the university hadn't been there for a lineup yet, but with the identikit sketch there remained little doubt that Ivanov was their man. And with the student's witness report they would be able to pin the mobster down.
"You know sweet F.A.," Ivanov said calmly and with an arrogant smile on his lips. "You can't prove anything against me. I'm innocent."
The door to the interrogation room opened and a red-haired woman in her late thirties stepped in, Vickie. "He's there," she informed her two colleagues and was already gone again.
David stepped to Ivanov from behind. "Well, in that case let's see how innocent our witness thinks you are." He was still amazed at the man's arrogance in refusing to have a lawyer present, but also pleased because it made the possibility of getting something out of him easier for them.
They brought Ivanov to the room used for the lineups. Five other men were already inside, all of them FBI agents in casual clothing, similar to the mobster's. Ivanov took the plaque with the number four and was placed in the line. Then, the five men entered the room.
In the meanwhile, James O'Connagh, Don and Jake Thornpike, the student who had made the witness report against Ivanov, waited on the other side of the mirror. And Ivanov had hardly entered the room on the other side of the pane when Thornpike called out: "That's him! The one with the number four!"
Jake's certainty didn't waver a jot while the procedure was carried on according to the regulations. The men all stepped forward one by one and turned sideways before they finally all left the room again, but there was no doubt in the student. "Number four," he confirmed when O'Connagh at the end looked at him questioningly. "For certain."