Page 17 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

B ecause of the elevated train tracks, daylight never really entered the bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

For that reason the owner never bothered washing the single plate window and thus the interior was a murky gloom that made the faces of the few patrons look ghostly pale as they sought answers or oblivion in the bottom of a glass.

Hanna watched the door as customers came and went.

This wasn’t her regular place, or even neighborhood.

She was here on her brother’s behalf, tasked with meeting a man and taking him to meet another man, a man Hanna loved more each time she saw him.

She was nineteen, practically an old maid among her people, with raven-black hair and dark eyes.

Her independent streak ran wide, giving her a devil-may-care attitude that had attracted suiters since she was fourteen.

Her late father had been indulgent and let her choose her own husband rather than arrange a marriage to a man twice or even three times her age.

She’d known the moment Balka Rath arrived from Europe that he was for her, and yet when she was in his presence, she felt like a gawky little girl, with cheeks that blushed red through her normally dusky complexion.

She was certain he only saw her as her brother’s little sister and not a woman who yearned to be with him.

She sipped from her glass of warm gin as two men who looked like regulars stepped inside and waved at the bartender. Finally the door opened for a single customer and Hanna knew even without the cheap cardboard suitcase clutched in his arms that this was her mark.

He had an innocence about him that she rarely saw anymore.

He was maybe twenty, but had the wide eyes of a child and a coward’s tentative demeanor.

He didn’t walk into the bar. He stood in the doorway as if he needed permission to be there.

He glanced around, his eyes not making contact with anyone else’s, his hands very white against his case’s faux leather exterior.

It didn’t appear that he saw who he’d come to meet and stood at the entrance unsure and awkward.

Hanna waited another beat, judging how long he’d loiter before fleeing into the mounting dusk.

She timed it perfectly, sliding off her barstool just as the boy reached for the saloon’s door handle. She was at his side in an instant and spoke in an obscure Eastern language she knew he spoke. “Don’t leave. You are here to meet Balka Rath?”

He startled, his doe-like eyes widening even further. He nodded.

“I will take you to him. Wait a moment.” Hanna went back to the bar, downed the rest of her drink with a quick jerk of her head, and paid her tab.

Outside, she thrust her arm through the boy’s, startling him. She liked to pretend to be out on an evening stroll with her beau. “What is your name?”

“Vano,” he said in a soft voice.

“In America, that name is John.”

“John,” he said, as if tasting the word. He seemed to like it. “John.”

“I am Hanna Muntean. Did you arrive this morning?”

“I did.”

“And the crossing. How was it?”

“Not very good. The waves made me sick the entire time. I could barely eat.”

She glanced at him. Even with evening settling over the city, he looked gaunt and drawn, his cheeks sunken and his Adam’s apple protruding like a goiter.

“Do you have a place to stay?”

“I…I was told that Mr. Rath will take care of me.”

She chuckled. “That one can barely take care of himself, but I’m sure he’s charmed someone to take you in like a stray puppy.”

They walked four blocks through neighborhoods that didn’t improve. Kids as feral as dogs loitered on stoops and watched passersby like predators. Horse manure filled the gutters, and the streetlamps threw light that barely made a dent in the darkness.

The tenement she took him to was indistinguishable from a hundred other buildings in the city.

Brick front, small windows, seven stories, no elevator or hot water.

Privy sitting alone on a patch of weedy ground in the back.

Hanna had grown up in a handful of identical places, moving whenever fellow tenants were getting wise to her father robbing them every chance he could.

They climbed to the fifth floor and Hanna knocked at one of the four doors.

Balka himself opened up. He wore a black peacoat with a dark watchman’s cap perched on his head.

Seeing his face gave Hanna a familiar twinge at the base of her belly.

“In,” he said brusquely and ushered the two inside.

The apartment was sparse, the furniture mismatched, but there were curtains in the window and color pictures cut from magazines pinned to the walls. These were feminine touches. A woman lived here, Hanna thought. This wasn’t Balka’s place. He’d borrowed it for this meeting.

“Vano?” Balka said, and the timid boy from the old country nodded.

Rath turned his attention to Hanna. He peeled a ten-dollar bill from a roll he kept in the pocket of his moleskin pants and held it out for her. “Beat it.”

She found courage at that moment and shot him a saucy wink as she took the cash. “For this kind of money, I’ll throw in a couple of other services, just for you.”

“Not if you were the cheapest whore in the world and I was John D. Rockefeller.”

He’d already turned away so never saw the look of murderous rage on her face that lent truth to the saying about women scorned.

“What do you have for me?” Balka asked as soon as the girl was gone.

“Karl sends you his greetings and this.” Vano set his suitcase down on the kitchen table and unwound the string ties that held it closed.

He opened the lid. Nestled in the neatly folded clothes was the smallest radio transmitter Balka had ever seen.

It was no bigger than a shoebox. Cased in black Bakelite, it had a couple of knobs and a window to display frequencies.

There were insulated wires to connect it to a battery and a flexible metal antenna currently coiled up in the valise.

“What are my instructions?”

“Your brother wasn’t very specific in terms of what he has planned.”

“He never is,” Balka told him.

“But he says you are to turn on this radio every night at midnight and listen in on the frequency he has preselected. He will contact you. He said it won’t be for at least two weeks, so start listening in on the twenty-fifth of this month.

He said you need access to a van and a reliable driver who will be available after the twenty-fifth no matter what. ”

Balka thought Hanna’s brother, Hanzi Muntean, was perfect for that.

He owned a box truck the family used to move stolen merchandise in and out of the city.

Funny, he reflected, that when it came to an operation involving his brother, he would use only fellow Romani and not any of the trust-funded anarchists he knew.

He missed what Vano said next and asked him to repeat it. “Karl said you are to familiarize yourself with certain landmarks throughout the city, their addresses, and what is around them for several blocks.”

The young Romani courier rattled off six names that meant nothing to him, but which Rath knew well.

If Karl was thinking of attacking any of these places, his ambitions had grown in the months since the two brothers were together.

Not grown, he thought. They were oversized.

Balka had serious doubts that Karl understood the scope of what he was planning.

He also thought that Karl overestimated the commitment of the American anarchists.

These were effete intellectuals for the most part; men who were dissatisfied with being pampered and wanted to pretend they mattered.

Even with a hardened cadre of men from back in Europe, any assault on one of these targets was tantamount to suicide. There was no doubt Balka would do what he’d been tasked with, but he didn’t understand it.

Again, the courier said something that Rath missed and had to ask him to repeat it. “Finally, your brother said that you are to treat me like you did Patrin back in Sarajevo.”

That last sentence startled Balka. His eyes narrowed. “Are you sure he said Patrin?”

“Yes. Like you did in Sarajevo. He said you would know what this means.”

It was one thing to use up local people, strangers. They meant nothing. However, Vano was one of them, maybe not of their clan, but of their people. For such a step, Karl had something big planned indeed. As he’d only made such an order once before.

Patrin Kirpachi had been the man to smuggle the gun from a Serbian paramilitary group called the Black Hand to Gavrilo Princip, who later used it to assassinate the heir of the Austrian empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife.

For security reasons, the Black Hand demanded the courier be silenced—permanently.

Karl had ordered Balka to do it himself.

Balka, never one to shirk a direct order in furthering their cause of anarchy across Europe, subsequently garroted his best friend.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he muttered under his breath and threw a right cross that the young man never suspected or saw coming.

Vano was unconscious before he collapsed to the floor with a thud that made the shoddily built structure shudder. His jaw was dislocated, and several teeth were loosened, but he was in a realm beyond pain.

Balka went to the small window and opened it up against its stop.

He peered out and down. He saw no movement, and only a little light from the building on the opposite end of the courtyard.

No one was heading for the outhouse. He lifted the courier off the floor by slipping his hands under Vano’s armpits.

The boy weighed less than a hundred and twenty pounds, and while Balka himself wasn’t particularly big, he was immensely strong.

He dragged the unconscious man to the window and jockeyed him so that his upper chest lay over the sill, his arms dangling into the night.

Vano’s belt was a length of cord. Balka grabbed it and lifted at the same time, pushing the young Romani farther out the window.

In moments the boy reached a tipping point and fell silently five stories to the stony ground below.

Enough bones broke that only a jigsaw master could ever make sense of him.

Balka closed the window and looked around the apartment.

Nothing had been moved or disturbed. The couple that lived here was in New Jersey visiting family and wouldn’t return until after the body had been discovered, taken away, and likely forgotten.

He picked up Vano’s suitcase with the portable transmitter.

He would ditch the case once he found a secure place for the radio.

Stan the bombmaker from a couple of nights ago would be a good candidate. For the time being he didn’t want any of the other Roma in the area to know he was on a job for Karl. Hanna and her brother, Hanzi, thought he was meeting a simple smuggler and knew nothing connected to his anarchist work.

He locked the apartment door behind him, heard a door close many floors below, and went down himself, no more thought given to the man he’d just murdered.