He could hear the girls screaming before he even reached the surface. Still cowering in the front of the gutted dinghy, they calmed immediately when they saw their tormentor in a headlock. Any enemy of Scuric’s was likely an ally. Quinn dragged the sputtering Croatian onto the rocks and turned him on his side so he could vomit out the seawater he’d gulped in his panic. Quinn wiped the water off his face and motioned the girls to come out of the boat with a nod of his head.
“You speak English?” he asked.
The shorter of the two gave him a hesitating nod. “Some little.” She looked at the pistol but her eyes played along the myriad of bullet and blade scars that covered his torso, sizing him up.
“What’s your name?” Quinn said, stuffing the gun in his waistband to get it out of sight and free up his hands to deal with Scuric. Water streamed from his jeans, making a pool on the white rocks at his feet.
“Belma,” the girl said.
“Okay, Belma,” Quinn said, stooping to take a look at Scuric’s wallet. A quick count showed it fat with a few waterlogged Croatian kuna and nearly 5,000 euros in large bills. “Can you find your way back home?”
She nodded at Scuric. “He take… passport.”
Of course, Quinn thought. It was a common practice for human traffickers and pimps to hold a woman’s passport to keep her in check. A quick search of Scuric’s front pocket found the documents safe in a plastic bag. As Quinn suspected, the girls were from Bosnia, caught up in a prostitution scheme when they’d been promised jobs as nannies or housekeepers.
Song jogged down the concrete dock as Quinn handed the passports back to the girls, along with the wad of wet money from Scuric’s wallet.
“Don’t trust men like this anymore,” he said. “Now take this and go.”
Belma’s deep green eyes flew wide when she saw the bills. “Home?” she stammered, unsure of what he meant. “Yes? I go home?”
“Yes, you can go home,” Quinn said. He looked up at Song. “The driver?”
She nodded, leaving the man’s fate to Quinn’s imagination. “They may take the van. The keys are in the ignition.”
Quinn instructed the girls to drive only to the nearest bus station where they should ditch the van and take a bus back into Bosnia. Still stunned from their brush with the cruelest of futures, they shuffled away quickly, jumping into the van and spraying gravel as they sought to put the whole episode behind them.
Quinn dragged Scuric into the thick foliage just up from the jetty and out of sight from anyone on the anchored Perunika. He press-checked the chamber of the pistol and released the magazine to make certain that it was full. The Hrvatski Samorkres HS2000 handgun was sold under license to Springfield Armory in the United States as an XD or X-treme Duty Pistol. Scuric’s gun was an XDS, meant for concealment rather than as a primary battle weapon. The subcompact single-stack carried only six rounds of .45 ACP ammunition, including the one in the chamber. Quinn found a second magazine in the same pocket where Scuric had kept the girls’ passports. Song had taken an identical pistol from the van driver and now pointed it at Scuric as she squatted beside his shoulder opposite Quinn.
“The Fengs,” Song hissed. “Where are they?”
“Why?” Scuric wagged his head, gaining some of his swagger back after the underwater ordeal. “Did one of them run off and leave you at the altar?”
Quinn planted his palm straight down against the man’s nose, bringing a sputtering string of curses. Quinn snapped his fingers above the man’s face. “Listen up,” he said. “Are the Fengs on the boat?”
Scuric blinked, his eyes watering from the blow. “You are both dead.”
Quinn gave a chuckling shrug. “You aren’t doing much to convince me to keep you alive.”
“Quickly,” Song snapped, sending a hammer fist into the man’s unprotected groin. “Are the Fengs on the boat?”
Scuric drew himself into a ball and moaned. He shook his head. “Gone…”
Quinn cuffed him in the face to keep his attention. “Listen to me,” he said. “Where did they go?”
“I tell you the truth,” Scuric groaned. “All of it. I just help with passport sometimes. New names — I’ll give them to you — all Hong Kong SAR blanks. Good shit. Really, I have no idea where they go.”
It never failed to amaze Quinn that tough guys who bullied women caved so quickly during a comparatively mild interrogation. “The one with the weasel nose,” he said. “Who is he?”
“A snakehead,” Scuric said. “I only ever call him Jiàn.” The Croatian brightened as if he had news that might save him. “I do some business with Jiàn, moving people sometimes. He don’t know I learned some Chinese when I move Afghan heroin sometimes. Him and Fengs, they talked freely on the mobile…” His voice trailed off.
“And,” Quinn prompted, “what did they say?”
“I tell you, you let me go?”
“I only want to find the Fengs,” Quinn lied. “I have no problem with you.”
“They are going to meet someone named ‘Big Business. ’ ”
“That makes no sense,” Quinn said, looking up at Song.
She shook her head. “Tell me what you heard in Chinese.”
“He said ‘Da Ye.’ ” Scuric nodded his misshapen head. “That means ‘big business,’ right?”
“Da Ye.” Song looked at Quinn, shaking her head as if she didn’t want to believe it. “Big Uncle.”
“Who’s Big Uncle?” Quinn asked.
“A triad boss your FBI has been hunting for more than a decade. They know he exists, but have no idea what he looks like. Very notorious.”
Quinn smiled, trying to imagine someone being a little bit notorious. “And how about the Ministry of State Security?” he asked.
“Oh, we know exactly who he is,” Song said. “But he causes problems for your FBI. That’s no problem for us. When last I heard, he was in Madrid.” She took the cell phone from her vest pocket and moved a half step away to make a call.
“Those Fengs,” Scuric said quietly to Quinn as if they were partners now that Song was otherwise engaged. “They are, how you say it? Bad news. I fed them and, you know, showed them hospitality since I worked with Jiàn sometimes. They used two of my girls before they left. That little Ehmet Feng, he’s… wrong in the head. He carved up both girls with Serb cutter once they finish with… you know, hospitality. Sick bastard killed them all like it was nothing.”
“I wonder where he got a Serb cutter?” Quinn felt the urge to kick the Croatian in his crooked head. Song turned and stared down at him in disgust, the phone still to her ear. Scuric noticed her darkening mood and changed tack.
“I heard the little shit, Ehmet, say something else on the phone,” he said. “Wherever they are going, they have some big plan.” He nodded for effect. “They talked about something called the Black Dragon. Some kind of Chinese weapon—”
Song’s pistol barked twice as she put two quick rounds in the man’s heart. Stunned, Scuric’s mouth opened and closed like a dying fish with a stomped head.
Quinn, who was surprised by little in the world, jumped at the sudden gunfire. He leveled his pistol at Song and glared. “What was that?”
Song put her gun slowly on the ground and raised both hands. “A man who would stand by and do nothing while another murdered two young girls is a murderer himself.”
“No argument there,” Quinn said, glancing through the foliage at the beach. He wondered who else had heard the shots. “Still—”
“He had knowledge of sensitive Chinese technology.” She cut him off with a dismissive shrug, as if she shot people every day, but Quinn could see the worry lines at the corners of her mouth had deepened. She wasn’t used to this. “My government cannot allow that information to leak.”