Blood Trust by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online

and hot cross buns are just out of the oven.”
    Seating himself across from the president, Paull poured a cup of coffee and took a hot cross bun on a small china plate. Fully concentrated on Crawford, he neither drank nor ate. Crawford had proved himself the kind of man who takes to the presidency the way a chef takes to the cutting board. In the space of the ten months since he had ascended to the highest office, he had quietly but methodically dismantled all of his predecessor’s initiatives, replacing them with others that conformed to his conservative agenda.
    “Sorry to get you out of bed at this hour.”
    “I was already up,” Paull said. “Your call caught me at Walter Reed.”
    “You’re not ill, are you, Dennis?”
    “No, sir. Lyn Carson died.”
    “Ah.” The president put down his cup and stared up at the ceiling, as if watching out for Lyn in heaven. “Sad business, Dennis. My condolences. I know how close you were with the family.”
    Paull couldn’t help but ponder the question of a double meaning. When he was with Crawford he was always aware that he had been one of Edward Carson’s closest friends and advisors, even though in his first meeting with Crawford after he’d been sworn in as president, he said to Paull, “I just want you to know, Dennis, that I value loyalty above all other traits.”
    Leaning forward, Crawford refilled his cup. As he sat back, he gestured at the dossier. “We have one helluva problem.”
    Paull took the file onto his lap and opened it. On top of a significant pile of papers was a black-and-white photo, a head shot of a man who Paull judged to be somewhere between forty and forty-five. It was impossible to see the face clearly or even to make out particular features, other than a full beard. It could be anyone.
    “Who the hell is this?” he said.
    “It’s not so much who,” the president said, “as what.” He cleared his throat, watching as Paull began to leaf through the intel that lay below the image. “His name, as you can see, is Arian Xhafa.” He pronounced the last word “Shafa.”
    “He’s Albanian,” Paull said. “Why should we care about him?”
    “That’s what I thought,” Crawford said. “Read on.”
    Paull did, rustling pages as he scanned them. Xhafa was the kingpin of the Albanian Mafia, of which there were at least twenty competing clans. That is, before Xhafa’s rise to power. Like Mao or Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of feudal Japan, Xhafa had vision—more than that he had the muscle to cajole, bully, extort, murder, and maim his way to the top of the heap by uniting all the clans.
    “He calls his men freedom fighters,” the president said, “and I suppose in some respects they are—fighting for Albanian freedom in Macedonia. But their true business is smuggling, though by the evidence in your hands, they’re not averse to a bit of murder-for-hire. There.” He pointed. “Read the particulars on that page.”
    Paull ran his finger down the sheet. Three hundred Macedonian soldiers slaughtered in Bitola, almost the same number in a pitched battle on the outskirts of Resen. The text was punctuated by highly graphic photos of mass graves, gaping pits filled with bodies, exposed to the photographer’s lens like raw wounds. Firefights in the mountain villages around Struga, resulting in ruins, cindered, smoking as if just leveled. Scattered around were charred bodies, warped and curled, barely recognizable as being human. The next page held more horrors, a series of photos showing the victims of assassinations, both inside Macedonia and in more far-flung places, such as Greece, southern Italy, even Turkey and Russia, that Xhafa or his people were suspected of carrying out. These areas were so remote, the countries involved of so little interest to Americans, that the atrocities barely made any of the papers and certainly were not rating fodder for CNN or FOX, let alone the three legacy networks.
    “This fucker’s a real live