Midnight Black

One

The ringing of the midnight church bells cued the four men standing on the rooftop that the killing had begun.

They moved towards the edge of the roof of the parking garage, four stories above the street, leaving their Audi behind and advancing through a row of parked cars and vans so they could get a better view of the action that should now be under way just a few blocks to the north.

They'd expected gunshots, explosions, something, but after the twelfth low chime from the church next door, they all peered into the darkness, and they heard nothing save for the sounds of the street.

The men waited in silence a moment more, and then Vartan, only twenty-two years old, spoke in Romanian. "Something's wrong. It should sound like a war."

Iosif sniffed. He was thirty and muscular, with a trim beard that rimmed his jawline and no mustache. He answered back in Romanian. "What war? It's just one guy."

"Yeah, against four, five enemy? All armed. And . . . one guy or not, that dude is a killing machine. You know he smoked six men down in Sofia."

"I heard four," Alin retorted from Vartan's other side. He was nearly forty, tall and overweight but strongly built; a thick red beard grew from his round face.

Vartan shook his head. "It was six. The last two with his bare hands."

A fourth man, a small forty-eight-year-old named Avram, chimed in now. "I talked to a Bulgarian cop I know. He read the police report. The killings happened down in Varna, on the coast. Three victims. Two bodyguards and the main target, an underboss of the Kyulev crime family."

Vartan leaned back against the grille of a tan Renault van in the middle of the row of six parked vehicles here on the edge of the rooftop lot. "I heard it was in Sofia, and I heard it was six."

All four of the Romanians thought the other three to be full of shit, and soon the silence returned as they concentrated again, listening for the sounds of violence.

When it came it was disappointing. A single crack of a gunshot snapped somewhere behind them, maybe half a kilometer away, but no one turned towards this noise. Gunfire wasn't anything special around here, and a shot from the south had nothing to do with them.

The Ferentari district of Bucharest had once been ranked the fourth most dangerous place to visit on Earth, and that was back before it really went to shit. The streets at this time of night were full of addicts, dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and gangsters.

There was no legit reason to move through Ferentari after dark.

The dealers, pimps, and prostitutes working the district were wisely frightened, though the addicts were blissfully unaware of the threats. But it was the gangsters who both knew what lurked in the shadows and remained unafraid, and the four on the rooftop belonged to this class. They were Balan Brigazi-Romanian mob-and as dangerous as this district was after nightfall, the four knew that no one around here would bother them.

They carried handguns inside their leather jackets, and Vartan, the youngest, also kept a tiny MP5K submachine gun hanging from a cable under his arm and extra magazines in his coat pocket.

But it wasn't the guns that protected them.

No, it was the brotherhood of the Brigazi, because their credo was the same as that of most mafia groups around the world.

Fuck with one and you fuck with all.

And nobody was going to fuck with all of Dorin Balan's people.

Light snow drifted through the hazy glow of halogen lamps positioned on a higher building next to where they stood on the roof of the parking garage, and the men stomped their feet and kept their heads tucked down in the collars of their coats as they continued looking into the night, their ears tuned to listen for the sounds of mayhem that must surely be playing out just a couple hundred meters away.

The pulsing late-night street noise below them continued, but that was it.

At 12:05 a.m. headlights appeared up there on the rooftop, circling up the ramp to the parking lot, and then a black Mercedes G-Wagen followed by a dark gray BMW rolled in the direction of the men standing by the row of cars.

Vartan, the young one, turned to Iosif, the muscular one, and said a single word.

"Nasul."

To this, Iosif said, "Cacat."

In Romanian, "Nasul" means "the godfather," and "cacat" means "Oh shit."

The G-Wagen parked along the row of vehicles in the lot, the gray 7 Series pulled up alongside the four men, and its back window rolled down.

A man older than any of the others sat there; the light was low up here, but still it glinted off his glasses and his watch.

Dorin Balan was sixty-six, small, and wiry; he looked just like an older version of the petty street thief he'd once been. Only the Rolex on his wrist, the chains on his neck over his coat, and his Maybach eyeglasses indicated that his stature around here had changed over the past fifty years.

He addressed Avram, the leader of the four. "I wanted to come see for myself."

Avram said, "Of course, sir. We expect news any moment."

Balan looked around now. "This is a strange place to meet."

"The asset picked this rally point. The street's quiet below, and I guess he thought we'd have a view from here, but we haven't seen anything yet."

The godfather nodded, then climbed out of the vehicle and lit a cigarette while his men piled out of the G-Wagen and the front seat of the BMW.

Dorin Balan had been a thief in Constanta, on the Black Sea coast a couple hundred klicks east of Bucharest. He'd graduated to bigger scores, then collectivized the local crooks, starting a gang that eventually controlled smuggling at the port. Cigarettes and booze, knockoff designer jeans, even cars.

And then he moved to Bucharest, and here he graduated to human beings.

Balan trafficked prostitutes to fifteen European nations; his girls were Romanians, Bulgarians, and Serbs, but he also acquired human capital from Russia, just across the Black Sea.

Sex trafficking had become less lucrative since the war in Ukraine began, but Balan saw the conflict as an opportunity. He reversed the flow of his contraband and began sending luxury items into Russia for a massive markup.

Sanctions on Western goods had hurt the rich in Russia. Local perfumes from Minsk or Volgograd weren't as prized as Chanel from Paris, so Balan had thieves across the continent acquire truckloads of perfume, watches, fine cheeses, furs, and other items, and he arranged transport across the Black Sea to a partner organization in the Russian port of Sochi.

This had made the Balan Brigazi millions of euros in the past couple of years, but all that was in jeopardy now, because although Dorin Balan was the most dangerous Romanian mafia boss in Bucharest, he was not the most dangerous mafia boss in Bucharest.

Not since the Italians moved in.

The 'Ndrangheta.

The Calabrian mob had taken up residence in the Romanian capital and were now organizing their own smuggling shipments into Russia from the riverine port of Medgidia. They sailed their boats along the Danube-Black Sea Canal and then across the water to Sochi.

The Italians had killed Russians who worked with Balan; they had depressed the price for luxury goods by introducing competition, something no mafia capo has any interest in, and now the Calabrians were threatening Balan's operation here in the capital city.

Roughing up his thieves, stealing his trucks and containers, even kidnapping the daughter of a Brigazi underboss.

The Calabrian capo was ensconced in a safe house here in Ferentari, protected by ten of the organization's toughest soldiers. He was tasked with taking over the underworld of the city, and Balan knew it would just be a matter of time before the Italian began ordering the killing of Balan's men and the dismantling of Balan's network.

The foreign mafia had to go, but the Romanian hadn't survived in this dangerous world for this long by being anything other than a pragmatist. He knew that his own enforcers were no match for the 'Ndrangheta's well-trained goons.

And that was where the American came in: to thin the herd.

Balan had heard of an incident in Bulgaria five weeks earlier. A lone man had entered a nightclub in the posh Chayka neighborhood in the coastal city of Varna to talk to a Bulgarian mafia underboss, and apparently the conversation had not gone well. When the dust settled and the smoke cleared, the underboss was dead, as was one of his bodyguards, and two more of his men had been horribly injured, disfigured for life.

The next day Balan got a call from an American saying he was responsible for the mayhem in Varna, and he wanted to work out an exchange of services. He would do a job for the Balan Brigazi if the Balan Brigazi gave him something in return.

And what he wanted in return was not money.

Balan tried to vet the man, but he was a ghost, even to contacts he kept in the Romanian intelligence services, so instead of a direct hire, Balan told the American he had to audition for the job first.

Thirty-six hours later, a semitruck carrying a load of explosives to be shipped into Russia was left in front of Balan's HQ in Bucharest's Pipera district. The Italians had stolen the ordnance from the Romanian military, and then, somehow, the American stole it from them. Balan's boys had found the cab of the truck soaked in blood, evidence of arterial spray.

The American was clearly skilled, but he was also clearly crazy. The copious amount of blood from a couple of low-level thieves in the cab of the truck was an obvious tell.

This assassin, whoever he was, murdered with a unique rage.

The truck was loaded ninety percent to the roof, over one thousand four hundred kilos of Semtex plastic explosives from the aptly named Czech firm Explosia.

Along with the satchels of ordnance were triggers and detonators. Enough bang to blow up a city block in Ukraine if the Russians so desired.

Balan didn't normally deal with weaponry, but he knew the Russians would pay up big for this score.

But more important for the Romanian gangster than making some money off the product, Balan had found his champion, the asset that he needed to rid him of the Italians, once and for all.

Balan messaged the American and told him the truck of goods was a very fine start, but what Balan really needed was for a group of thugs from Italy to die.

The two men agreed upon terms. In exchange for the American's single demand, he would go to a bar the Italians frequented in their off-hours, kill whatever 'Ndrangheta men were present, and leave no trace that Dorin Balan had ever been involved.

That was the extent of their arrangement, but Balan envisioned one more step to the affair. If the American asset made it back alive to this rally point, then Balan would demand that the American do one more job before he fulfilled his end of the bargain.

If the American said yes, Balan would send him after the Italian capo himself.

And if he said no, then Avram and the others would riddle him with bullets right here to make doubly certain there were no comebacks.

The Romanian godfather was a pragmatist, after all.

After another drag from his cigarette, Balan said, "Where's Christofer?"

Avram said, "He's in a van a block from the bar. He reported in at fifteen minutes to midnight saying the asset was going in and would act at the stroke of twelve."

The old man looked down to his Rolex, then back up. "It's six after. Check back in with him."

"Yes, sir."

Avram pulled his phone and hit a button. He waited, and the men around him waited, as well, but he got no answer. With a nervous look to his boss, he then turned to Iosif. "Take Vartan and Alin. Just go to the van, not to the bar. Understood?"

Before he could reply, Dorin Balan shook his head. "No. You boys all stay here with me in case the asset shows." He turned to the six men who'd arrived with him in the two vehicles. "Everybody who came with me will go. Get Christofer out of there, whatever the situation."

Quickly, he added, "And stay away from the Italians."

Six of the eleven men on the rooftop raced off in the Mercedes and the BMW; Balan and the four men who'd been waiting here for the past hour remained.

The snow began to pick up a little.

Just a couple of minutes later a new set of headlights appeared from the ramp on the opposite side of the rooftop lot, just to the right of the small concrete structure built around the stairwell.

"Pistoale," Balan said softly, and all the men pulled their pistols except for Vartan, who scooped his MP5K from under his arm and brought it to his shoulder.

But then the vehicle came into view under the lampposts as it passed the door to the stairs, and everyone recognized Christofer's Ford Transit van.

Pistols were reholstered, but Balan was not eased. "Vartan, find cover in case this is a setup by the Italians."

Vartan hurried to the front of the Renault van that had been there when the men arrived, took a knee, and peered out the side towards the south with the wire stock of his gun in the crook of his shoulder, watching the Ford as it slowed in front of the others.

Balan himself walked up to the van and found Christofer behind the wheel. Checking the interior quickly to make certain his man was alone, he said, "Why didn't you answer your phone?"

Christofer was twenty-eight, smarter than the other goons, and Dorin Balan's nephew. "I . . . I took the asset where he told me. A couple blocks away from the bar. He had me call in to Avram to say he'd begin his attack at midnight. As soon as I hung up the phone the American had a gun in my face. He wanted my mobile. I had to give it to him. He seemed to know I had a backup; I had to give him that, too. He told me to wait for him . . . and I did, but . . ."

"But what?"

"But . . ." Christofer got out of the van. The older man could see his hands shaking.

He put his hand on the vehicle to steady himself, and he just stared at the ground in front of him.