Everett Beaumont Franklin was a drunk, a drug addict, a perverted sex flend, an adulterer, a cuckold to younger men who could still get their cocks hard for his wife, although he didn't know it, he was also somewhat of a pederast, depending on your thoughts about age cutoffs for sexual consent, and he was a pediatrician. He'd been living a double life for what I could tell by going through his things for quite awhile. It's a weird kind of freedom to assume the role of the evil bastard, and I was not going to squander the opportunity until it had run dry.
The medical conference was a three day event, but Dr. Franky had come weeks earlier to "prepare", and by now the hotel staff knew what that meant, even if the other doctors at the conference had no clue. From the signs in the lobby I could tell that the conference started tomorrow which was bad timing as it's one thing to assume someone's identity when no one was looking, but a whole different game when you're walking around wearing the wrong face for people who already knew the shit personally.
I had his hotel room key, his wallet, and the rest of his fucked up life as resources, but I thought better of wearing his suits and his conference name tag around while chatting in a fake British accent.
One of the things about doctors is that they all have that god complex which is easy to exploit. After training for years about something as complex as the human body they get the mistaken impression they must be experts at everything and then make all the right mistakes. Mistake one, when you collect questionable child porn on your hard drive, don't do so under the impression that having a long password to Windows will protect you. Five minutes and a Linux USB boot stick later and I had Dr. Franky's whole fucking life. Mistake two, don't keep your passwords to all your bank accounts and websites in a text file called "passwords.txt" on your desktop.
He had a few nice suits in the closet but he had ruined them with an assortment of terrible ties, and he was a fat bastard to boot so it was all useless junk. His business cards had the URL to the site of his clinic, which led me to Gerry. Gerarld Franklin M.D. was his brother, business partner, and better. Gerry was slick. He dressed well, appeared outwardly not to be human filth, was the right height, weight, and build, was younger, was an ear, nose and throat guy, and had a good smile.
I was going to have to dye my hair darker to be Gerry, but I kinda like myself with dark hair anyway. Moreover, Gerry had only been practicing in the UK for a few months before which he had been in Australia for seven years, and the attendees list of the conference had no Australians on it so the chance of running into someone Gerry had met before was low. I was not going to be attending anyway, but this made everything easier.
I had to meet Hristo tomorrow afternoon at the hotel pool and before that there was work to do, I put on Dr. Franky's whoreheuse outfit, pulled the brim of the dirty hat down low, and withdrew as much cash as I could get from the ATM ten blocks away from the hotel. It wasn't enough for a suit of Gerry's quality, but it got me hair dye and nice shoes.
I put all 4 of the doctor's suits in a garment bag and traded them to the little tailor shop across the street for something decent in my size and a beautiful tie. I stood in the bathroom mirror with blow dried dark brown hair and tried practicing that movie star smile that Gerry had.
I had found four different jewelers on the net that looked like they would do the trick, and I was curious to see if any of them matched up with the corrupt but honest bastards that Hristo had been tasked to find me. Hristo was a nonchalantly efficient little swindler and to his credit he led me in the back door of the highest profile of the jewelers that I had myself found which told me that Hristo had himself judged me correctly, and that he had an appetite for bigger things than offing fat fucks who anally tortured his sister.
"Suit is for good, but you not look like lekar frank" Hristo said as he led me down the back alley, through the unmarked door to which he had a key, and then up a three flight staircase that was with a completely different decor on each floor. First rusted metal stairs with 20mm bolt stubs sticking out of the concrete block walls, then puce yellow painted plaster with travel posters from the 1980s, then finally the third floor which was all class. Real plants in pots, not plastic ones. Cared for and manicured, leather couches but not the tacky kind, glass tables with a tea service laid out. Everything simple and clean but expensive and tasteful.
"Im doc Franky's brother Doctor Gerry. You got that Hristo?". I said as we ascended the stairs. “Razbrax lekar Geri. I am assistant." "Like hell you are kid. At least not until you learn to stop rolling your R's when you speak English." I stopped him at the door before going in. "First give me the lowdown on this guy." "Da ok.." "Don't say Da, start again".
"Ok, this guy he not from here. He from Syria, but long time ago. He speak perfect, very smart. Always wear suit. He have guy who work for him at desk, he smart too. Dees guys they no trust women. Keep wife at home with kid. I thing yunger guy he like little brobrat or the word for taty brat kid" "Cousin". "Yeah coozin., Lekar Geri, you know dis guy he look nice, but only look. I hear he have a guy kill one time". "Second Hristo, it's Jer-Ree. Dock-ter Jer-Ree not lekar Geri. And what the fuck are you thinking bringing me to a guy like this? I said smooth and easy." "You say no questions, dis guy he don care." "Alright, he speak English?" "Yeah he perfect at everything." "Great, we go in, and you keep your fucking mouth shut."
The jeweler's little cousin was forty plus, in a three piece brown suit with the gayest mustache I've ever seen on a homophobe in my life. He smiled at us like he knew our middle names and led us in to the office with a single word "gentleman". He stood in the corner hands folded as we sat down at the desk. I would have been nervous but Hristo was calm as fuck and somehew that put me at ease. The jeweker was 60 something, and wearing almost the same three piece brown suit and he was dead behind the eyes. "Whenever you're ready sir" he said to me. I stared at him for ten seconds without moving or talking then realized this muther fucker was not going to blink, nod or breath until I did, I reached in my pocket and pulled out the 2 little metal tips that I had screwed on my boot laces a month ago before going on this damn job. I found the one of the pair with the right scratch marks and handed it to him. He looked at it under a small magnifying eye loop and asked "anti-clockwise I assume?"
I said nothing because I was busy worrying about how he knew that. He pulled small pliers from his desk drawer and opened the little container: and extracted the three small stones. He carefully inspected each one under very high magnification and then without looking up he said "I cannot give you what they are worth, but then you would not be here otherwise." He said something in Kurdish to his cousin who left and came back with a leather pouch. It was cold in the office but he had begun to sweat. "You may keep the pouch with my compliments. I'm sorry it cannot all be in Euros, but right now it's a bit easier to move Ron and Leva."
The cousin handed me the pouch which I opened and glanced at. I saw the 2 thick stacks of Euros but had no idea what Ron and Leva were worth so I handed it to Hristo and told him to count. Hristo whispered in my ear the value in dollars. I stood up. Hristo stood up. The jeweler remained seated still examining the stones.
"At this point gentleman, I would normally thank you and ask you to keep us in mind for your future business needs. However in your case, it is perhaps better if you forget all about us and this place.".
Now that I had some operating funds it was time to start working on a plan. Or at least an attainable one, When you aren't funded and have no idea why the fuck things went to hell you tend to sit around twiddling your thumbs and thinking up loads of fanciful bullshit plans about how to right the world. Or at least your little part of the world, or perhaps just how to find the woman who made a real impression on you again and see if you can convince yourself and her that spending time together in the future, as an actual normal future was a halfway good idea. She was a killer. Note to self, the woman you can't stop thinking about, the one who's real name you don't know, the one you came inside of without even talking about birth control or STDs, the one who took the money, and the kid, and the gun, that woman, yeah she fucking shoots people in the head. I spent too much time wondering is she was somewhere thinking about how I somtimes did that too. So perhaps it's an equal playing field out there, the killers, the fools who play for the wrong team because they like the thrill, or the money or were bored, the dangerous, they fit together in some fucked up way.
I got off the bed and walked over to the minibar and started to down little bottles of shitty overpriced liquer, as sometimes being drunk and angry are good prerequisites for decent planning sessions. Problem one, I didn't know her name, Two, by now she could be very far away with the cash she had. Three, what was I going to do when I found her, If I could find her at all. What did I actually know that was helpful? She had a kid with her that looked nothing like her daughter. She wouldn't fly, it would be too dangerous with the kid in tow. Which means she's driving. She would have stolen a car, or more likely bought one. She would have changed her appearance. Did she know this part of the world well? Did she have resources? Too many questions, back to what I know. About her and how to track her, not enough. I didn't see this shit coming and so never dug deep during those weeks of training. That was, at the time, a safety feature, not knowing stuff I would have to confess to later. Maybe it was not about my knowledge of her at all. Maybe the only link we had was our shared experience. She was angry, that I knew. Deep inside where it counts, she was fucking pissed off. I could feel that when were were fucking. She liked it but there was that deep rooted hate in her. Not of me, but of the world and what it had done to her, what she had let it do. I knew that hate. So she's gonna go fix it if she can. She's going to find the fuckers that set it up and try to understand why they almost succeeded at getting us killed. She's going to need someone to blame for the girl having to watch her father's head explode. She's going to investigate. Infiltrate. Find them and fuck their shit all up. That's how I will find her. I'll find them first and wait. I'll be there to help. She's not going to let it go and neither will I.
So that was the plan, find them. The people who architected this shitshow in the first place.
Rick Stone was ex-special forces and now worked doing action movie consulting. Showing actors how to shoot guns without looking like dipshits. Rick got a call, he was busy, he told them I was their man. Maybe Rick knew? It's unlikely but I would have to reach out anyway. The boat captain who tried to shoot us and ended up at the bottom of the Danube I never saw before that night. The rest of the guys on the assault team during the raid never showed up at the boat, so I gotta figure they're all dead. Which leaves Petar.
Petar met me in Istanbul. Petar led the raid training. Petar was the man running the show on the the ground. Petar didn't come on the raid with us. Which means Petar was likely still alive somewhere. On a beach with a lot of cash perhaps. But who was pulling Petar's strings?
So that was it. Step one, find Petar and kill the bastard slowly until he told me what I wanted to know. Back to Istanbul. Back to the training ground. Back across Eastern Europe to the source of this shit. I wonder if they knew I was coming. I wonder if they knew she was. If they had any brains they would be long gone by now.
I stopped drinking. Not because it was time time to clear my head and get my fucking act together, but because all the little bottles were empty.