"So, shall we bury them?" one of his young companions asked.
"Negative," Hardy said. "We'll take their weapons with us. Otherwise, leopards and vultures need to eat, the same as worms."
The roam phone in his pocket shivered silently. Hardy removed it, saw the number on its LED screen, keyed "ACCEPT" to take the call. Said, "What?"
"We have a job, if you're available," the caller answered back.
"Same place?"
"The usual."
"I should be there sometime tomorrow."
"See you then."
Bucharest, Romania
The Paradise Hotel had never lived up to its name.
For starters, it was situated in the Ferentari district, ranked on most lists as the capital's worst neighborhood for crime and drugs, though it was located a mere three miles southwest of bustling, thriving downtown Bucharest. In Ferentari, alleyways and vacant lots were heaped with garbage that no city agency bothered to haul away. Armed gangs patrolled the narrow, littered streets, fighting sporadically for turf, most selling cocaine, heroin, or any other outlawed drug they did not privately consume.
None of that concerned Natalie Karpin as she stood on Strada Anghel Dogaru, directly opposite the misnamed Paradise Hotel. She had no interest in drugs or gangs today, much less in sanitation.
She was looking for a tourist—an American, from New York City—who had traveled some five thousand miles at great expense to wallow in debauchery.
No prude herself, Karpin had certain lines she would not cross, nor tolerate the felonies of others when she had an opportunity to cut them short.
One such offender was Stuart Delaney, a successful Wall Street lawyer living on his own in the Dakota Apartments on Central Park West, in Manhattan's Upper West Side. He was unmarried, seldom entertained at home, and kept his nose clean on the public record—no small feat, considering that he was what psychiatrists would call a pedophile.
Natalie Karpin had no patience with the jargon tossed around by shrinks and lawyers representing clients who found it impossible to stop molesting, raping, sometimes even killing children in pursuit of psychopathic sexual release. She knew the textbook definition of pedophilia called it "a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or adolescent experiences a primary sexual attraction to prepubescent children," but she was not concerned with anyone's attraction to another person, animal or some inanimate object.
When they crossed the line from lusting into predatory action there could be no turning back.
Police did what they could to keep that plague in check, but some transgressors were simply beyond their league. Stuart Delaney earned an average four million dollars yearly from his legal practice, without adding in the laundered dividends received from offshore banks. He took six weeks' vacation during most years, traveling the world to visit nations where sex with children had been banned by law but government corruption meant such crimes were tolerated with a wink and nod if tourists and rich locals amply greased local authorities.
Delaney alternated jet-set traveling between Cuzco in Peru, Bangkok, Thailand and Bucharest, depending on the season and prevailing weather. This time he was in Romania and booked into the Paradise, a long way down the social scale from Manhattan co-op overlooking Central Park.
If Karpin had her way, this would be the attorney's final trip abroad and his next transatlantic flight would find him in a Boeing 747's cargo hold, securely bolted in a casket.
She knew Delaney was inside the Paradise, a spartan room on the third floor, waiting for Iosif Brâncuși, a scumbag pimp, to make delivery of one boy in the range of six to eight years old. For two hours alone with his intended victim, the attorney would be shelling out 62,000 Romanian leu, equivalent to $15,000 U.S.
That was no small fortune in a country where the average worker with a college degree earned just over $500 per year before taxes.
But today, with any luck, Delaney and Brâncuși would be going out of business. Back in Gotham, IRS agents would pick over Delaney's leavings, while in Bucharest, surviving bottom-feeders would carve up Brâncuși's trade and any cash he hadn't spent feeding his methamphetamine habit.
Again, Natalie Karpin didn't give a damn.
She crossed the street, waded through garbage in an alley on the north side of the Paradise, and entered through the hotel's backdoor once she lockpicked its cheap deadbolt. Inside, she put the pick away and drew a Glock 17M pistol, the same model issued to FBI agents stateside, chambered in 9×19mm Parabellum, with seventeen rounds in the mag and one in the chamber. Unlike the Bureau's guns, this one had an extended muzzle, threaded to accommodate a sound suppressor that added one-third to the gun's loaded weight of two pounds.
Natalie climbed the service stairs and found room 313 halfway along a dingy corridor with half the ceiling lights burned out. That seemed to fit, given the kind of business normally conducted at the Paradise. There was no peephole in the door that would permit its tenant to observe her in the hall.
Natalie knocked and waited. The door opened to reveal Stuart Delaney, forty-four years old and looking every second of it, blinking at her in surprise. "Wrong room," he said, mangling the tourist guidebook phrase, and was about to shut the door when Karpin raised her Glock and shot him in the face.
No fuss and very little muss.
She dragged him toward the middle of a living room whose central feature was a double bed. The other furniture consisted of a small, chipped dresser and a single straight-backed wooden chair. She closed and latched the door, ignored Delaney's leaking corpse, and sat down in the chair to wait.
The best part of an hour passed before another visitor knocked on the door to 313 It had to be Iosif Brâncuși, since the Paradise had no room service and a maid would not appear until the tenant had checked out, no matter how long he or she remained. The no-frills dump provided handy crime scenes, charging by the hour what a reputable place downtown might charge per night, and few of those who used its services were overly concerned with hygiene.
Rising, Karpin stepped around Delaney's body to the door, released its deadbolt, opened it and edged back to remain concealed from the latest arrivals.
Brâncuși entered first, leading a small boy by the hand. The pimp saw Natalie, blanched at the pistol in her hand, his client on the floor, then died with an amazed expression on his sallow face, blood pumping from a vent above his left eyebrow. The child fled and she made no effort to restrain him, heard him pounding down the stairs as she wiped down the inner doorknob to remove her fingerprints.
Romanian police weren't much on scientific crime-fighting, but even they knew basic methods and attempted the solution of a felony from time to time, if that seemed feasible.
As for the boy, Natalie reckoned she'd done all that she could do under the circumstances. Each year, some 1.2 million children were trafficked worldwide. Nearly one-fifth of those were smuggled out of Eastern Europe, a "significant proportion" from Romania, according to United Nations documents. Her work today would not have solved that problem, obviously, but it was a baby-step. Investigation of Brâncuși's murder, if police applied themselves at all, might turn over some larger stones and bare the maggots wriggling underneath.
Karpin had nearly reached her rental car when her roam phone buzzed on her hip. She recognized the caller's number, answered on the second ring. "What's up?"