Chapter Two
Two
Charlie rushed out into the third-floor hall, fighting with his jacket to get it on his trim frame. This done, he reached for the weapon on his hip. Running for the stairs on the north side of the building, he’d just gripped the Walther in its holster when his earpiece came alive again.
It was Videv. “American is in custody. Boss fired shot in air to scare him. We’re in the alley. Hurry.”
Charlie released his hold on the pistol and began sprinting down the stairs.
—
When he reached the ground floor he raced through the building, passing hotel guests, partygoers, employees of the restaurant.
Some were alarmed by the gunfire, but others were oblivious, the EDM in the air, the booze, or the party drugs in their bloodstream masking the noise.
He bladed his body through small crowds in the bar off the main lobby, then raced up a narrow hallway past the lavatories, pushing the drunk and the slow and the unmindful to the side as he moved, and finally he pounded his way into the kitchen.
He ignored the cooks and cleaners and servers, pressed on at speed to the back door, then shouldered it open, finding himself on a raised concrete platform in an alley between the hotel and an adjacent condo tower.
He pulled up and stopped, saw a half dozen men arrayed in the dimly lit space.
At the center, Sasho Minchev stood over a man in a gray business suit kneeling on the wet ground. The stranger faced away from Charlie; a bright smear of fresh blood on the starched white collar of his shirt shone through messy shoulder-length dark hair.
A stainless steel semiautomatic pistol dangled from Sasho Minchev’s right hand. Charlie had noticed the gun in a shoulder holster under his protectee’s arm the day before, and he’d been concerned about it ever since, because his boss didn’t seem like the type to practice safe gun handling.
Charlie had wondered if the pistol on his boss’s person might be the biggest danger he’d face on this job; he wondered it even more now, because the son of a bitch had just pulled and fired it, and now it hung in his sweaty clutches, his trigger finger twitching inside the trigger guard.
Charlie’s four colleagues stood in various stages of readiness in the alley.
Videv, the team leader, had positioned himself directly behind the man on his knees.
Big and burly Komitov loomed just to the left, his eyes on the prisoner.
Pulev, older and with a mustache that made him look like a Balkan Saddam Hussein, stood a few steps from Charlie by the door, watching the street but not looking particularly alert.
Chanev, bright-eyed, swarthy, and a couple of years younger even than Charlie, stood to the kneeling man’s right, his hand on the gun on his belt and his eyes fixed on his boss, waiting for orders.
Minchev said nothing. He just stood there, a sheen of perspiration glowing on his forehead, reflecting the light from the soft white sodium vapor lamps that hung over the alley from the rear of the condo tower; more sweat sparkled through little gaps in his dark beard.
His normally slicked-back hair hung down into his eyes, and his chest heaved inside his black suit.
His neck rippled with sinews emerging from the collar of his burgundy silk shirt, indicating tension in his shoulders.
Charlie hadn’t seen any cocaine around in the past day, but he now thought it was likely his boss was on something, or else he was just that damn stimulated from shooting his gun in the air and threatening the man on his knees in front of him.
Videv’s left hand rested on the prisoner’s shoulder, and he, too, looked to his boss for direction.
It was as if nobody knew what the hell the man in charge had in mind, but they all stood at the ready, prepared to help him do it.
The scene was a shit show in the making, and Charlie’s first inclination was to rush to his protectee, disarm him, and then escort him back up to the safe room and put him to bed.
But Minchev held his empty hand out, indicating he had other plans.
In English, the young Bulgarian mob boss spoke to the kneeling man. “You fucked up, Mr. Humphries. And for that you’re gonna have to pay a little price.”
The man kneeling there said nothing. He did not move; his face remained out of Coyle’s view, his head down as if in defeat.
The boss said something in Bulgarian, and then Komitov stepped forward and rifled through the American’s jacket, removing a wallet and a phone. He pocketed the wallet, then held the phone up in front of the American’s face, thereby unlocking the screen.
Then he handed it to his boss.
Minchev looked over the phone now. In English, he said, “Only two contacts.” He grinned at his prisoner. “You don’t have many friends, do you?”
Minchev tapped the phone for several seconds, held it back to the man’s face, then tapped it again. Charlie knew this move; his boss was changing the password so that he could unlock it any time he wanted.
When he finished, he said, “I’ll keep this.”
The boss held the phone up to the American a third time, took a picture. “And I’ll send this to everybody I know, tell them to be looking out for you.
“And this,” Minchev said, “this is for Bogdan.” He punched the American in the jaw, a glancing blow, unimpressively executed, though it still managed to echo in the alleyway.
Minchev shoved his pistol into his belt, then began heading towards the door back into the building.
Coyle had no idea who Bogdan was or what the American had done to him to earn the punch to the gob.
As Minchev passed by Videv, he spoke to the team leader of the security detail in Bulgarian; Videv nodded curtly, and Minchev grinned as he climbed the steps and reached Charlie’s position.
Coyle wanted to knock the smile off his employer’s face with a right cross. He didn’t know who the American was. Some thug from a rival concern, no doubt. But it didn’t matter.
Minchev himself was a piece of shit.
Everybody around here was a piece of shit.
And all Charlie Coyle wanted to do was go home.
As the capo passed him for the door, Coyle turned and followed him back inside, staying just behind and to his right.
As they moved through the building, Coyle’s training took over.
A four-month course in executive protection in London just two years earlier, a course he barely passed because he’d spent his evenings in his hotel room downing bottles of cheap Monkey Shoulder blended scotch when he should have been resting up and preparing for the next day’s challenges.
But now he was all business. Clocking corners, registering dark spaces, examining the hands and the eyes of the hotel employees, seeking information about any potential threat.
His right hand hovered near his weapon, but he affected a guise of calm as he directed Minchev through an employee-only access door.
As they passed through the busy kitchen, Coyle and his protectee walking at a steady pace, Minchev turned to him.
The Northern Irishman kept his focus on the path ahead and not the agitated Bulgarian’s face.
“This asshole shows up,” Minchev said, “tells me he knows who I am, what I do. Says he needs to go to Russia, asks me to smuggle him in. I ask him what skills he has to repay me; he tells me about a job he did here in Bulgaria five years ago.”
Coyle didn’t care. He just took the man by the arm and directed him through a doorway that led to an old utility elevator that would take them right up to the top floor.
Minchev laughed a little now. “He tells me about a Russian spy who turned up floating in the Dambovita River in Bucharest, stabbed in the ribs and the neck. The American says he did it. Asks me if I know about what happened.”
As they reached the service elevator, Minchev continued talking, his hyperagitation just getting on Coyle’s nerves now. “Yeah, I know about it. Police arrested the wrong man. A friend of mine went to prison for it, for what that American did.”
They stepped into the elevator now, and Charlie pulled the door closed, then hit the button for the top floor.
The gears began grinding, the doors rattled back and forth in front of them as the pair traveled up a moment, and then Minchev spoke over the noise.
“I told Videv to break both his legs and his jaw, then dump him in Priroden Park. Let that fuck crawl out of Bulgaria with his mouth wired shut.”
The young mafia man laughed at this, but Charlie did not; then they stood in silence.
To hell with all these assholes, Charlie thought, but he also thought of why he was here.
Three months. Pay bills. Get gone.
Sweat dripped from the Bulgarian’s face, and Charlie watched it splatter on the dusty wooden floor of the elevator car.
Finally, the doors rattled open.
Charlie took Minchev by the arm and led him out into the hall, turning towards the safe room, but before he’d made it two steps, he heard a blurted shout in Bulgarian coming through his earpiece.
More shouting erupted immediately after.
Minchev couldn’t hear the exchange—he wasn’t in direct comms with the security men—but Charlie put his thumb on the push-to-talk button.
A series of muffled pops came through the earpiece just before he pressed to transmit.
Gunfire.
He grabbed Minchev roughly now, began shoving him forward.
“What’s wrong?”
Charlie didn’t answer. There was a time to let the protectee take charge and a time to take charge of the protectee. As of right this moment, Charlie Coyle was running this show.
As he pushed the smaller man up the hallway, he transmitted over his radio. “Coyle for Videv.”
One of the other bodyguards seemed to have his mic open on his radio. All Charlie could hear was shooting, yelling.
Charlie unlocked the door, drew his pistol, and shoved Minchev inside. He tried to transmit again, but whoever was pressing their talk button was still overriding the network.
“Fuck!” he shouted in frustration.
Suddenly, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He snatched it out and answered it, all while holding his pistol on the door, backing up with his protectee through the living room, between the couch and the kitchen island, in the direction of the bedroom.
“Coyle.”
Videv’s voice sounded nearly frantic, his breathing labored, as if he were running at a sprint. “You have boss?”
“We’re in the safe room.”
The team leader spoke quickly, words separated by heavy breaths. “Subject has…escaped. He has…Komitov’s gun…and radio.”
Bloody hell, Charlie thought. “Where’s Komitov?”
“He’s stabbed, in the alley. Pulev is with me. Subject is fleeing. Chanev is chasing him.”
Coyle tried to clarify. “Is the subject in the building or still outside?”
A pause, though he could hear Videv’s heavy breathing in the phone. “In building.” The background sounds of screaming patrons came over the call now.
“But,” Charlie said, “he doesn’t know what room we’re in, right?”
“Hotel security said he was in building this afternoon. We don’t know where he is going.”
It was clear to Charlie that Videv didn’t have much more awareness about what the fuck was happening than he did.
This was all going so bad, so quickly.
Charlie extended his gun arm even more. Anyone coming through the door to the suite was going to catch a 9-millimeter round to the chest; this he told himself with complete assurance.
Videv added, “Me and Pulev are taking the south stairs, coming up to you.”
The building had a main elevator, a larger freight elevator for moving furniture and such, and a pair of stairwells, one on the north side and the other on the south.
A lot of directions an attack could come from, so Charlie decided he’d just defend from inside the unit, because there was only one viable access point for an attacker.
Videv added, “We will be there in two minutes. Hotel security is in the elevator; they are also coming up.”
“Copy.”
The call went dead, but then Coyle heard more shouting in his earpiece. A snap of gunfire was just audible before whoever it was who was transmitting took their finger off the button.
The Northern Irishman turned around to face the bedroom behind him for the first time, and he saw that his boss had his own pistol out again, sweeping it around like a fucking idiot.
Charlie shouted. “Put it down!”
The stainless semiauto shook at the end of the man’s hand. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
Charlie closed the distance, then pulled the gun from his boss’s clutches and tossed it onto the bed up by the pillows. Angrily, he shouted, “You’re not shooting me tonight!”
Minchev looked up at him, and Charlie suddenly recognized the effects of cocaine or amphetamine or something on his employer’s face, now amplified by the terror in his eyes, and he wondered if the man was going to have a heart attack.
Charlie did nothing to lessen the chances of this when he said, “The American is in the building. He has a gun.”
Wiping sweat from his forehead with the arm of his jacket, Minchev said, “It’s no problem. It’s no problem. I…I have five guys who will—”
“You have four guys,” Coyle corrected, and then he turned away and headed back into the living room.