Act of Treason

10

R ussians,” Gazich growled to himself. “Goddamn Russians.”

He stood, bent at the waist, his forearms draped across the open window-frame of the car, his gun dangling out of site in his right hand.
Gazich hated Russians almost as much as he hated Muslims. The two groups had ruined his ethnic homeland: the Muslims with their all-or-nothing, backward religion and the Russians with their arrogant, clumsy, bullying, pagan ways. Bosnia could have been so much more if only they’d left her alone. But of course they hadn’t. The Muslims had encroached from the southeast and the Russians from the northeast. The Muslims did so slowly over centuries, while the Russians swept in after WWII and took everything by force. While Western Europe flourished, communist Yugoslavia suffered. The Russians were now gone and the Muslims had either been killed or turned into refugees.
Gazich looked at the dead man and resisted the urge to spit on him. Leaving DNA at the scene of a crime was not a wise move. He had shot the man once in the heart and then a second time because he was so pissed. He’d wanted to shoot him in the head, but given the relatively public environment he was in it was ill-advised. The man even smelled Russian. He reeked of cheap cologne and unfiltered cigarettes.
“What are you…KGB or Russian mob? Not that there’s a big difference anymore. I should shoot you again,” Gazich muttered.
He honestly didn’t know what upset him more; the man’s nationality or that the people who had hired him to do the job in the States thought so little of him that they had sent a Russian to kill him. Gazich casually took a drag of his cigarette and slipped the tip of the silencer into the waistband of his pants. With his right hand he pulled the bottom of his jacket over the gun. He spotted a small two-way radio on the seat and decided it might come in handy. After stuffing it in his pocket, he stood and took a step back. As he waved good-bye to the dead man, he pushed the gun further into his pants and looked up at the hotel across the street and to his left. About half the rooms were lit up.
Gazich had surreptitiously stopped by the café owner’s house earlier in the day. He had come in through the garden even though he doubted the Russians had enough men to watch both his office and the old man’s house. Gazich told Andreas that he was sorry he’d been caught up in the middle of this. Andreas accepted the apology and then eagerly agreed to do whatever he could to rid himself of these Russians. He told Gazich everything he knew about them including the fact that they had two rooms on the third floor of the hotel directly across the street.
A quick survey of the windows told Gazich they were every bit as lazy as he expected them to be. No one was keeping an eye on the street. Who knew with Russians, there was a very good chance they were already drunk. The Bosnian stuffed his hands in his pockets and started down the street with renewed anger. Part of him wanted to march over to the hotel, kick in their door, and shoot them in the head, but as tempted as he was, he needed to talk to them. He needed to find out who had sent them.
Two doors down, Gazich entered an apartment building and proceeded to the top floor. At the back of the building, in a maintenance closet, there was a metal ladder screwed into the wall. Gazich climbed it and popped the hatch that led to the roof. He pulled himself up, lowered the hatch, and started working his way toward his building. He stayed in a crouch, not because he was worried that someone would see him, but because he was afraid he’d walk into a clothesline. A minute later he knelt next to the hatch that accessed his building. Gazich lifted it up and descended into the darkness, closing the hatch behind him. He was now in the center hall at the rear of the building. He walked toward the front and pulled out his cell phone. He punched in the number for the café and after a few rings one of the daughters answered. A half a minute after that the patriarch was on the phone.
“Hello?” the old man answered.
Andreas had told him the phones were tapped, but at this point Gazich didn’t care. “Andreas, it is me, Alexander. How are you?” Gazich slid his key into his office door and turned the lock.
“Fine, my friend. Are you coming to see me?”
“Yes. In fact I’m up in my office.” Gazich hit the light switch. “I have a little work to do and then I’ll be down for a drink.”
“Good. I’ll see you when I see you.”
Gazich put his phone away and looked around his office. Everything was not as he had left it. They had tried to put things back, but they were too sloppy to do it right. In addition to the slight disorder he could smell their cigarettes. They had been so arrogant they actually smoked while pilfering his stuff. Gazich continued surveying the room. There was a large wood desk with the usual stuff on top: a lamp, an old Rolodex, computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, and phone. The walls were lined with bookcases. Gazich turned to look back at the door. That was when he noticed something. It was a motion sensor placed just above the trim board by the floor.
“Good,” he said aloud. “We can get this over with sooner rather than later.”
Gazich grabbed the two-way radio and clipped it to his belt. Next, he moved the coat rack next to the desk and draped his jacket around the top pegs. To finish it off he set his baseball hat on top and turned on the desk lamp. The radio on his hip crackled to life and a male voice began speaking in Russian. Gazich didn’t know Russian, but he didn’t need to. He knew what they were asking. Two similar radios sat in a charger on the bookcase across from the desk. Gazich grabbed one, turned it on, and set it to the same channel as the one he’d take from the dead Russian. Next, he held them within inches of each other and pressed the transmit buttons. High-pitched feedback squawked from each box, creating an extremely irritating noise.
Gazich released the transmit buttons and walked back out into the hallway. He closed the frosted glass door and inspected his work. The silhouette of the jacket and hat on the coat rack wasn’t perfect, but it would be enough to confuse them. The two-way erupted again, with an angry Russian voice yelling what Gazich guessed were curses. The Bosnian held the devices next to each other one more time and let loose a blast of feedback. As he walked to the window, he pressed the button one more time and then turned his attention to the entrance of the hotel across the street. Five seconds later two large men came tearing out the front door shoving a pedestrian out of their way. One of them was still struggling with his jacket, a shoulder holstered pistol clearly visible against his off-white shirt.
With pure professional disdain, Gazich shook his head and positioned himself for the ambush.