“Try not to miss,” Remi said.
Balancing, he looked up at the window, gauging the distance, and jumped.
CHAPTER FORTY
Sam pulled himself up and into the window, then dropped down on the other side. Moonlight angled in, casting a blue glow across the concrete floor and the rows of floor-to-ceiling industrial shelving. The pallets of cardboard boxes wrapped in cellophane filled the majority of them.
Sam paused, listening.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
A clock high on the wall somewhere to the left counted off the seconds. Other than that, all was quiet.
He followed along a row of shelving toward the sound of the clock until he reached the chain-link enclosure. A padlock hung in the hasp, securing the gate. Dimitris was, as Remi had described earlier, tied to a metal support beam in the center of an otherwise empty storage area. Blindfolded and gagged, he didn’t move. Sam took out his pick and popped the lock open.
Dimitris shifted, bracing himself for whatever might come.
“It’s me,” Sam whispered. He removed the blindfold and gag.
“Where’s Zoe?”
“Safe. With Remi.”
“I know what they’re doing,” Dimitris said as Sam moved behind him to cut the ties. He nodded to the shelves just outside the bullpen. “They’re smuggling the heroin out with the olive oil. I have photos of—”
The metallic jingle of keys hitting the door at the front of the warehouse startled him.
“Someone’s coming,” Sam whispered. He picked up the blindfold and pulled it over Dimitris’s eyes. “Don’t move. I’ll be right out there.” He left the bullpen, closed the gate, and hung the padlock on the hasp, hoping whoever was coming wouldn’t look too close and notice the lock wasn’t actually secured.
A door near the front opened. The lights went on as Sam moved behind the next row of shelving, his knee knocking against an open box filled with small glass vials as he crouched. The glass tubes rattled as the guard’s footsteps echoed across the concrete floor as he headed for the office. Sam aimed his gun as the guard paused, then walked back to the bullpen to check on Dimitris. Apparently satisfied that all was as it should be, he returned to the adjacent office space, unlocked the door, then walked past the window that overlooked the warehouse. Less than a minute later, he exited, locked the office, and left. The moment Sam heard the exterior door closing, he returned to the bullpen, freed Dimitris, and the two hurried out the back.
Zoe threw herself into his arms the moment he stepped out the door. “I was so worried about you.”
“I’m fine.”
Sam stood in the doorway. “Let’s get out of here.”
“What about the heroin?” Dimitris asked.
“Forget the heroin. If they come back and find you missing, we’re all in trouble.” He started to push the door closed.
“Wait,” Dimitris said. “I know how they’re getting the drugs out. They’re smuggling it in those unmarked olive oil tins.”
“What tins?” Sam asked.
“They took out a pallet full of them. I heard them saying it was for the Heibert shipment. It was going out tonight.”
“Heibert?” Remi looked at Sam. “That’s the name Rube mentioned.”
“Regardless,” Sam replied, “the last thing he’d want is for us to step in the middle of an Interpol investigation.”
“What about the explosives?” Dimitris asked.
Sam, about to shove the door closed, thought about the two Interpol agents who’d been killed because of an IED on one of the Heibert ships. “What explosives?”
“This,” he said, accessing something on his phone screen, then showing it to Sam. “I couldn’t get in because the office was locked, but you can see them laid out on the desk. Four of them.”
Sam took the phone, enlarging the photo. Though slightly out of focus, there was no doubt that he was looking at an assortment of detonators—not what he expected to see in an olive oil production plant. It was, however, something that might come up in the heroin trade. Especially when looking for a way to eliminate any evidence, should one of their shipments fall under suspicion by the authorities.