Page 53 of Lash

"Well then, I'll get to work," he says. "Please, however, stay here. I cannot have you five wandering the base. You know this."

"We have been traveling for a very long time, Nils. We are ready to rest. We drove straight through from Ancona."

"What is that, twelve hours?"

"More, with stops."

He pushes on his knees to stand up. "I'll let you rest, then. I'll come back for you in a few hours, get you some food, and go from there."

I stand up and embrace him. "I cannot thank you enough, Nils."

He grins, slapping me on the back. "Nico, my friend, you saved my life and my career. I will be in your debt forever. This is just a down payment.”

"You've made good on it, Nils. I am proud of you."

He ducks his head, grinning, and then bids us all goodbye and heads out.

Within minutes, we are all asleep, crashed out on the floor and bed and wherever we can stretch out. So tired are we that even the floor feels comfortable.

Nils'girlfriend is several years older than him and of a higher rank—she's attractive, a short woman with dark brown hair and pale blue eyes and a no-nonsense demeanor. Nils introduces us, explains to Major Lisel Neufeld my connection to and experience with Pugli.

She scrutinizes me and then nods; we're in a conference interview room somewhere in the bowels of an administrative building. "Your evidence," she asks. "What is it?"

“Footage of interviews with eyewitnesses, documents showing the paper trail connecting Pugli to payments, bribes of government officials, and an audio recording of Pugli himself giving an order for the assassination an upper level admin at an American embassy—the individual in question had stumbled across Pugli's interference in some kind of operation that would have exposed him."

"The unsolved murder of Jeffery McCann," she guesses. "You have evidence of this?"

"And much else besides."

She frowns at me. "And you have been sitting on this for this long?"

I glare at her. "He burned my family alive in front of me, Major Neufeld. What would you have done?"

She sighs. "I cannot say—who could guess how they would react to such trauma?" She taps the table with a pen. "You have access to this trove of evidence?"

"I can tell you how to. It is in a storage locker in a train station in Berlin." I give her instructions on how to retrieve the evidence. "All I ask is that you make damned sure that monster is brought to justice. You have to beabsolutelycertain your case is airtight, Major Neufeld. If it isn't he will weasel his way out of it, and if that happens, you and everyone you care about will be dead within seventy-two hours.”

She nods, seeming unfazed by my warning. "Believe me, I am well acquainted with how Pugli does business, Mr. Dragos." She rises and we shake hands. "If the evidence is what you claim, it should be the nail in the coffin for Mr. Pugli. I am only one member of a multi-country, multi-agency task force investigating his operation. We have enough evidence as it is to put him away, but we have been looking for that one thing to make sure there is no possibility of error or escape."

"Well then, my evidence should be that," I say. "And I can guarantee you, all of it will be admissible. I made sure of it."

Nils arrivesat the god-sized hangar in his personal SUV a few minutes after the rest of us, his uniform crisp and perfectly creased.

I shake hands with him, and then I gesture at the huge aircraft. "So. All is arranged?"

He nods. “Yes. You will land in Manaus, and the next day, a helo will take you wherever you need to go. You will make one stop en route.”

I arch an eyebrow at him. "Oh?"

"I have a contact just outside Manaus. He is not always on the right side of the law, but he is a good man. He will provide you and your friends with weapons. I cannot supply personnel—that would attract attention I do not think you want, but I can provide transportation and weapons." He claps me on the back. "I owe you, Nicolae. My life and my career, I owe you."

I return the back-slap. "We are even now, Nils."

A snort. “No, my friend. We will never be even. But this is a start."

I shrug. "If you say so. I am grateful. My friends are grateful."

He embraces me. "I'll go over things with the pilots once more, and then I have a meeting to get to." He hesitates. "It's good to see you back among the living."