Page 8 of Denied Access
“Why don’t you take a leak and see what you can hear?”
The red door leading to the facility’s restrooms was conveniently located near the quarreling group. David nodded before downing half his pint in a single swallow. “What?” he said in response to Joe’s raised eyebrow. “I’m a Method actor.”
True to form, David got to his feet and started toward the bathrooms. His gait was a bit unsteady, and he flashed the bartender a disarming smile as he passed. Joe had been skeptical about the former thespian at first. The Unit normally had a hard-and-fast rule that no one with less than five years’ military experience could attend selection, but the kid was proving to be a natural.
Maybe JSOC should be recruiting more theater majors.
Joe gave his partner a couple of seconds’ head start, then downed his own beer. He wasn’t usually one for amber brews, but this one had sucked him in. He only wished he’d paid a bit more attention to the alcohol content before ordering. Grabbing his mug, he headed toward the bar for a refill, conveniently arriving at the same moment David drew even with the quarrelsome men.
Joe set his mug carefully on the polished wood and angled his body so he could see as well as hear the action. David did his part to linger as long as possible as he approached the bathroom door, but he didn’t try to feign a reason to stay. That was the right play, as things at the table had just escalated. One of the newcomers shouted a couple of choice epithets that Joe recognized from the crash course his partner had provided on Russian curse words.
The seated man closest to the offender seemed remarkably calm considering what the agitator had just said about his mother. Without even acknowledging the other man, the seated patron grabbed his beer mug and lifted the glass to his lips. Joe had heard the phrasepatience of Jobbefore, but this was the first time he’d seen it embodied. Maybe patience was just in the Latvian blood.
A millimeter before the beer’s foamy head touched the seated man’s lips, he had a change of heart. A considerable one. With an expertly executed flick of his wrist, he rocketed the contents of his mug at the offender. The standing man pawed at his face, no doubt to clear the burning alcohol from his eyes.
He didn’t quite make it.
The moment his midsection was unprotected, the seated man fired a right hook into his opponent’s liver. Joe cringed in sympathy. The punch’s recipient never stood a chance. One moment he was digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. The next he was on the ground in the fetal position.
As if on cue, the table’s occupants swarmed to their feet. No weapons had been drawn, but Joe still would have thought twice about mixing it up with the men had he been the offending party. The four had the heavy shoulders and meaty hands of laborers, and their expressions didn’t speak so much to anger as quiet resignation. They were not bar-fight novices.
The remaining aggressor seemed to share Joe’s assessment.
With hands raised in the universal symbol of surrender, he crouched over his fallen comrade and hooked his hands beneath the unconscious man’s armpits. Then he dragged his companion out the door and into the night.
While Joe was fine with the notion that all’s well that ends well, he was still suspicious. Very rarely did a drunk retreat from the field of battle with his tail tucked between his legs. More often than not, the night air revitalized his fighting spirit. Were he a betting man, Joe would layodds that the agitators would return with friends or lurk outside in ambush.
Or both.
With this in mind, he reached into his pocket for his stash of currency, dropped a few lats on the bar, pointed to his empty mug, and held up two fingers.
“Nyet,” the bartender said. “Za schyot zavedeniya.”
Joe was a little iffy on the literal translation of the second half of what the bartender said, but he thought it equated to something along the lines ofit’s on the house. The bartender seemed to confirm Joe’s hunch by pushing the bills back across the polished wood before filling two glasses with Valmiermuiža. After setting the steins in front of Joe the big man said, “Zah zdah-rohv-yuh.”
“Zah zdah-rohv-yuh,” Joe echoed back.
Life was good.
He had a beer in his hand, a completed mission under his belt, and a teammate who was well on his way to earning a permanent spot in the Unit. Latvia might not be Club Med, but Joe had certainly been on assignments that were worse. Much, much worse.
Life was good.
“We’ve got a problem.”
Joe turned to find David at his elbow. For a former theater kid, David was pretty good at moving silently. “Maybe, maybe not. Drink your beer. If those two knuckleheads don’t come back with reinforcements by the time we finish, I think we’re in the clear.”
Joe had intended his words to be reassuring. David didn’t seem to be taking them that way. Rather than grabbing the mug, he gripped Joe’s shoulder and leaned closer. “I’m not talking about the fight. I’m talking about what I found in the bathroom.”
Joe should have known this was too easy.
Latvia was no longer part of the Iron Curtain, but its proximity to Poland and thereby Western Europe made the nation a convenienttransit point for black-market goods destined for Russia. From hashish to heavy weapons, there was literally no telling what David had discovered stashed in the shitter.
Bracing himself for bad news, Joe asked the inevitable question.
“What’d ya find?”
“A bomb.”
