Page 54 of Sigma
“Take your chances,” I say. “Go to your family. Go somewhere with them.”
“Apollo will find us.”
“No, he won’t.” I feel a frisson of cold certainty shiver down my spine. “He won’t be alive to do so. Not once we’re done with him.”
He searches me. “Somehow, I believe you.”
“You think he’s worse than either his mother or his grandfather?” I ask. “Because I don’t. And we ended them.”
“He is not the same as them. He is an unusual man, I think. I have spent my career investigating organized crime—I was Interpol, based here in Berlin. Apollo Karahalios is…strange.”
“How so?”
“He has blood on his hands. You do not gain this attention in the world of dealing arms and shipping large quantities of drugs as he has without shedding blood. But he does not do so needlessly.” A pause. “And, from what I have heard and what I know personally, he does not hire out his dirty work to underlings. He oversees shipments himself. Negotiates the deals himself. If someone betrays him, if someone requires punishment or there must be an example made, he does it himself, with his own hands.”
I frown. “Forgive me if I don’t applaud his leadership skills.”
“I do not say so. I just say that he is complicated.” A shrug. “Not simply ruthless and ambitious like his grandfather, nor unhinged and bloodthirsty like his mad bitch of a mother.”
“You knownothingabout how bloodthirsty and crazy Gina was,” I snap. “Not adamnthing.”
“But I do.” He eyes me with something like a sympathetic wince. “I was newly hired into the ranks of Interpol twenty years ago. My first assignment was to investigate a disastrous mess on a small island in Greece. What we determined was that the Karahalios clan had kidnapped the wrong person, and paid the price.” He lets a significant pause linger. “We had evidence of some of the assailants—the names and faces of the kidnap victim and the men who assaulted the compound. But somehow, the investigation just never…went anywhere. It was very strange, you know? But Vitaly was a bad, bad man. Wanted in many countries, yet we could never pin enough evidence on him to bring him down. So when he turned up dead? I think those who perpetrated the assault were seen as having done the world a favor. And if it were our girlfriend or our wife who was in that basement?” A shrug. “I saw with my own eyes the remains of Gina and her pet monster.”
His eyes fix on me, communicating a wealth of things his words don’t. “I could read well enough what had happened. They got what they deserved.”
I frown at him. “So, you knew it was me who killed Apollo’s mother. You knew he had kidnapped my daughter—and me, for all intents and purposes, even though I was going along willingly. As in, not physically forced. You knew he has something awful planned—for me, for my husband, maybe my daughter.” I shake my head. “You knew all this, and you still went along with his plan?”
He frowns. “To protect my wife and my sons?Ja. I do not know for certain that Apollo would murder children. So far, he has not, so much as I am aware, at least. But can I take that chance? Would you?”
I sigh. “A rock and a hard place.”
“Just so.” He rolls his shoulders. “Will you let me go?”
“Will you betray me back to Apollo?”
“Nein.” He bobs his head to one side. “If it is my life or my family’s, or yours?Ja. Otherwise, I would not.”
“Fair enough.” I gesture with the pistol. “Go on, then.”
“You are not going to untie me?” He looks around. “I am many miles from my home.”
I shake my head. “I may understand your position, but you still were part of a plot to kidnap me and my daughter. My understanding only goes so far, as does my trust.”
I walk backward to the driver’s side door, open it, and lean in without taking my eyes or gun off Kai; I grab his wallet—or the rubber band-bound collection that serves him as a wallet—and remove all of the cash but a €20 note; this leaves me with a little over two hundred euros, which is decent little sum. I tuck his wallet into his hip pocket.
“There,” I say. “Now start walking. Hit the U-Bahn and hope someone takes pity on you. I don’t know. I’m letting you live, Kai—I’d count your blessings.”
He sighs, nods, and turns to walk away. He only makes it half a dozen steps before he stops and looks back at me. “Spain.” He rolls a shoulder. “I believe he is based in Spain. In my investigations of him, his personal holdings are all in his real name. It should not be so hard to find him, now that you know who he is.”
He fades into the darkness, then, and I watch him go.
“I hope I’m not making a mistake by letting him go,” I say to the night.
“I think not,” the night responds.
I jump half a foot in the air, squealing. “Anselm! You scared the hell out of me!”
He’s standing behind me, just suddenly there. His hair, somewhere between blond and brown, is not shot through with strands of silver, but otherwise the years have not touched him. You wouldn’t look at him twice in a crowd, but if you did, you’d see the hard muscle and the lithe movements of a born predator.