Chapter 83
GOZAN WENT TO the door of their shabby room at the Armstrong Hotel and looked through the peephole. He opened the door for Balar Aram and his crew, who came in, moved through the suite like smoke, looked right through Gozan.
Gozan called out, “Balar, she’s in there.”
Balar went into the master bathroom, saw the dead woman lying nearly decapitated on a lake of blood on the floor. Balar’s eyes passed over the corpse. Then he went into the adjoining room, where the other girl was lying on the bed, her arms tied behind her back. Passed out cold.
Balar pulled the window drapes closed.
He said to Gozan in Sumarin, “This is not a holiday, stupid. This is work. And now you and your demented nephew have gone too far. Yes, Kheziralar. I mean you.”
Gozan said, “I told you that this was a mistake.”
Balar entered the smaller, second bath, yanked the shower curtain from the rod, spread it on the floor. He told Khezir to help him move the girl from his bed to the bathroom floor, and when she was lying on the plastic curtain, Balar took a gun from his inside jacket pocket. He screwed the suppressor onto the muzzle and shot her once in the head, twice in the chest.
Fffut, ffut, ffut.
Gozan felt his own blood leave him. It was as if the lights were flickering. He wasn’t a crazy man. He wasn’t evil. He didn’t want these women to die.
Balar was saying, “Gozan, put on your shoes.”
Gozan got into the small elevator with Balar, stood next to him, smelled what the man had eaten for dinner, and tried not to panic or get sick. He kept his eyes on the café menu on the panel above the buttons and asked no questions, because he knew none would be answered.
The car bumped to a stop. Gozan and Balar got out and walked toward the reception desk, where a stout middle-aged woman in a hotel uniform put down the phone and smiled.
“Good evening, gentlemen. How may I help you?”
The woman’s name tag read L. Bird.
Balar said, “Miss Bird, my name is Colonel Balar Aram. I am from the Sumar mission to the United States.” He spoke quickly and with a heavy accent.
“Oh,” said the desk clerk. She looked at the ID the man presented.
Balar said, “Your guests Mr. Remari and Mr. Mazul are of the royal family of Sumar, and their lives are in imminent danger. I must take them out by the service elevator. Do you understand? No one can use the elevator until we are gone. You have the credit card imprint?”
“For Mr. Remari? Yes, absolutely.”
“Consider this express checkout.”
“Absolutely,” the woman said again. She gave Balar the key to the service elevator and directions to the alley behind the hotel, and he gave the woman a hundred dollars.
Gozan sat with Khezir in the rear of the SUV as the Black Guard cleaned the room, removed the bodies through the back door, then returned to the reception area, where they destroyed the computer at the front desk and ripped out the surveillance camera. He could hear the muzzle fire through the glass when they shot the clerk.
Khezir said, “I hear sirens. Do you hear them?”
It was about two o’clock in the morning. Gozan wasn’t sure he and Khezzy were going to see the sun come up. Since its socialist revolution in the 1950s, Sumar had been a secular state. But if Gozan had believed in a God, now would have been the time to pray.
Instead, he just said to his nephew, “Don’t worry, Khezzy. Balar is taking care of us. We will be okay.”