by Jeff Spence
She stood there in shock as the big man slid down the back wall, blood welling up from a gash in his forehead. She looked at Ben.
He stood there, over the big man, the ice-axe in his hand and a look on his face like he might just take another swing at the good Mr. Smith. She reached out and placed her hand on his forearm.
"It's okay, Ben. He's out cold." He looked at her, coming out of the moment as if from a blackout or a dream.
"Wow." He breathed out, long and slow.
"Yeah, wow."
"Marina…"
"Yes?"
"…I think we had better get the hell out of here."
Ben was against them taking the time to go through the checkout, but Marina's cooler head won out in the end. She convinced him that paying and leaving as if everything were normal was the best way to avoid suspicion, and besides, hadn't they come because they needed some gear? If anything, the encounter in the change rooms was even more proof that they needed to get away from Greg Bass and his thugs. If they'd found them there, at the mall of the other side of town, then their every move was being watched, or monitored somehow. Bass could do that there in the States, but maybe his reach was a little shorter on the other side of the Atlantic. They got out of the store, made their way down the broad, glittering halls of the mall, and out toward one of the busier exits. There they ducked aside and paused to collect themselves. As they caught their breath in a bathroom designated for wheelchair users, the gravity of what had just happened started to dawn on Ben. Were the police being called at this very moment and a warrant issued for his arrest? For assault? For murder? He cursed Greg Bass under his breath and Marina looked up at him.
"What is it?"
"What did I just do?"
"You saved us."
"I might have just killed a man."
"You might have just killed a man who might have killed both of us. Fair trade in my books. Besides, I've had worse knocks on the head than you gave him."
Ben looked at her, not sure if she was serious. She paused. She seldom spoke about her childhood and the years in Sarajevo.
"Well, you know, rock climbing, that type of thing. If I haven't had one as bad, I've had close, and I don't think you killed him. Did you see the skull on that monster? There are turtles jealous of that guy!" She smiled and tugged on his sleeve.
Ben turned his eyes from her for a moment. "Maybe you're right.” She could flash from the fiery-eyed, anger-filled woman in the fitting room, into this playful, girlish woman in the turning of a second or two. He wondered what the knocks on her head were really from. The rock climbing thing didn't quite ring true.
"I am right. Bass wouldn't risk having his brain trust jailed, would he, despite what his thug said? If it were so easy to find someone able to do what he needs you to do, then he wouldn’t be going to all this trouble for you. Besides, the last place he wants you is in police custody, spewing your guts about him, the scroll, the threats."
"I guess you're right. We still have to be careful though."
"Agreed. Well, I've caught my breath if you have. Ready to move?"
"Yeah, more than ready."
Two figures walked swiftly between parked cars in the background as the henchman, bloody cloth pressed against his head, scanned the entrances to his side of the mall. He had called his partner in the van to tell him he had lost the girl, and so they'd each taken a side of the huge building, keeping an eye on the streams of people, each hoping that they didn't have to explain to their employer how a professor and a woman had gotten the best of two experienced enforcers. He knew he hadn't been unconscious more than a few minutes, but that would have been enough for them to flee the place… if they had gone immediately.
Of course they had. He cursed his own stupidity and vowed to give Ben Gela an answer to the gash on his head — then he tapped his phone on. As the line clicked open and the man on the other end said "Hello," the two figures stepped up onto a city transit bus in the background and huddled together in a seat near the back. The engine rumbled and the bus pulled away.
Greg Bass hung up his phone. He was not pleased with the hired help, to put it mildly, but at least the situation had shown him one thing: the connection between Ben Gela and Marina Saalik. Such connections could be exploited if need be. He leafed through a file on his desk. The tab at the top said "Saalik, Marina Ismetta." He praised himself again for being thorough, for being prepared, and for having his people create a file on Marina Saalik the moment he had seen her as a potential cog in the machine he had been oiling up and getting ready to roll.
His eyes scanned down the page. Born in Trebinje, Sarajevo: Former Yugoslavia; orphaned in the war sometime before age fifteen and taken to the US by the Red Cross in the fall of 1998. Finished high school as an independent student in her late teens. Recently completed training as an occupational therapist, into adventure sports at an elite level: snowboarding, skydiving, rock climbing. Injured two years ago in a cycling accident, a month in hospital, seven more in physiotherapy, treatment a success.
His finger tapped the last item on the page, one line below the medical outcome. Exhibited signs of emotional stress during rehab. Possible PTSD. Refused psychological treatment despite nightmares, lost time. Woke up screaming from night terrors twice. Deep-seated trauma causing almost constant fear and anxiety. He nodded to himself, tapping the page with his finger. That last item might be the most useful of all.
Bass walked over to the big glass window and stared out over his land. He had heard a rumour that Leonard Kantor had been in touch with the man in Indiana, or at least had sent a representative there. So the Israeli collector was leaning on the professor then. Or offering to help him. It was obvious that Kantor had realised Bass's involvement, or at the very least suspected it, but it was equally obvious that the Israeli couldn't prove anything.
Doing anything to stop Kantor would be difficult, but trying to stop Ben Gela? That would be a much simpler task, for either Bass or his rivals. True, Bass had Ben's family under his thumb and that would keep him in line for a while, but what if Kantor decided to play hardball as well? With tigers on both sides, where would the little rabbits run? Such prey could be unpredictable.
The rabbits might need a little extra help after all.
Bass typed in a password and an encrypted screen changed to a set of four boxes. He typed a four-digit code into the top one, a set of dates into the next, a dollar amount in the third, and his personal ID tag in the fourth: IREX. He then hit the return key and the screen returned to garbled text.
He had check it in half an hour. No doubt the personnel he needed would make contact by then. He looked forward to working with them, despite the cost. He was tired of dealing with the fumbling mistakes of incompetent help. It was time to call in some high-end assistance.
Things were about to get hot.
THIRTEEN
"Ooh, hot!" Marina smiled at Ben as she pulled the cup from her mouth and sucked her top lip.
He looked around to make sure no one was close, then whispered "I don't don't know how you can be so calm! They could be here anywhere."
"But we're in the airport now, what are they going to do, shoot us with angry looks? They can't do anything in here that isn't monitored and recorded, they can’t get in with guns, and they can't do anything violent and expect to make it out of here, with or without us — haven't you heard of Nine- Eleven? This is the safest place we can be, all things considered. Cops, gates and dogs everywhere."
She knew it to be true; she had even nonchalantly dumped her weapon into a trash can on their way from where the cab dropped them. She hated to part with it, but there was no way she could take it into the airport with her, and nowhere else to leave it, especially without Ben finding out. She only hoped that it went out with the regular trash, undetected, and that TSA agents weren't pouring over surveillance tape that very moment, looking for the individual who'd dropped an automatic pistol into a can just outside of an airport. Add in her nomina
l Muslim background, and she had be buried in some dark hole while her hair greyed and her teeth rotted out.
"Maybe you're right, we don't need to worry here…” Ben couldn’t help but wonder if David and Mimi were going to pay for this little manoeuvre, but he hoped they’d be safe once he was clear of Bass’s grasp, and assured the man that the work would get done, on Ben’s terms, and the results handed back to the rich Texan. He didn’t want to share his fears with Marina, not just yet, but if Bass or his men met them there, even inside the confines of airport security, and threatened to hurt his loved ones unless he came back… His heart wouldn’t stop racing until they were in the air, clear of this place, and clear of bass’s threats and bullying. he wondered even if this was the time to call David, at least let the man to be on the alert. Or would that only scare him. He noticed Marina looking at him, studying his face as if she could read his thoughts. He smiled, and nodded without much conviction. “You’re right, of course. But we should still be careful."
"And we shouldn't be doing anything that looks suspicious, like whispering, hiding behind corners, constantly looking behind us, or walking with our faces tucked into our collars! Relax. We might be in trouble, we might not, but nothing is going to happen inside a security zone, so for the next fifteen hours at least, we should relax. Rest. Store up some of that nervous energy for later. God knows I feel it too, but it won't do us any good if we get there exhausted. I have half a mind to stay here in the airport until you're done that thing.” Part of her thought that it might not be a bad idea.
"How do you do it? How can you be so calm?"
"I'm used to adrenaline," she winked at him, "but even more important, I'm here with you." Her eyes looked off behind him, scanning for a clock off in the distance, "And I think you took pretty good care of us back there."
She could see him take in her words, saw his chest expand a bit. He took a deep breath.
Okay, she thought, he’s calming down. If we can get through the next fifteen hours in relative comfort and safety, then we can worry about what comes next when we get to the other side.
"C’mon," he said, "we had better get down there, I think they're boarding first class now, we won't be much after that."
"Wait a minute, what? We're not flying first class?" She grinned and put her hand in the crook of his arm. “That’s it then, I’m outta here. I didn’t sign up for economy!”
On the other side of the promenade, obscured from notice by the shops and restaurants running down the centre of the aisle, a man in a suit kept pace with them. He walked with a cane, though he seemed to have little trouble with either leg. Occasionally, without slowing his walk, he looked over at something in a shop window as the couple walked past on the other side. As they neared their gate and fell into place behind a chattering group of tourists, the man with the cane came around the end of the promenade and stepped into line several people behind them.
On a cushioned bench, two rows in from the boarding area, a man looked up from his magazine as if to check the boarding status. As his eyes returned to his reading, he noticed the man with the cane, standing in line rather than sitting or taking advantage of early boarding, despite the apparent weak leg. He was carrying no suitcase either, and traveled with nothing to read, watch, or listen to while waiting.
A moment later, the man with the cane sighed and looked off to his right, his eyes drifting over each person in the room in a matter of seconds, then returning to stare at the boarding sign in front of him. Calm. Without suspicion. Confident.
The man on the bench touched his finger tip to tongue, turned the page, and waited for his section to board. He was reading a long article about one or other of the Kardashians.
He didn't give a rat's ass about the Kardashians.
The hum and vibration of the engines, the constant flow of canned air, the feeling of being stowed away in a dim compartment full of people, thirty-seven thousand feet in the air, powerless to control their fates, and so relaxed in forced trust; Ben drifted in and out of sleep. His resigned relaxation was almost complete.
Almost complete.
Marina lay still, consciously letting the tension drain from her muscles, breathing in only thoughts of peace, imagined fragrances of flowers, and memories of things she held dear. She could not yet rest her mind, and so she would use it to press rest upon her body.
Her cherished memories were not of sun-kissed vistas from atop Southwest mesas, or fresh cool air rushing by as she angled a bike just right to navigate a steep drop down a rocky trail, though they were all good memories. They weren't of lovemaking on lazy mornings, or even the translucent recollections of her mother's face staring down at her, sweet baclava baking its warm scent through the air of the little kitchen. No.
The image in her head was of a dark, cold room in a shack of a house in Trebxinje. She had seen a woman raped that day. A girl, really, not much older than she had been then. Could have been Marina herself, but for the grace of God. Well, his grace wasn't on the other girl that day. Marina had returned to Bratislav in the little house, shaking with rage and fear and nearly retching with the tension between feeling like she had to do something, and knowing that there was nothing she could do.
He had not held her. He hadn't even pressed her hand. The old man walked over to the kitchen cabinet, knelt down with a groan and popped up a narrow board below the sink. Unwrapping an oiled rag, he produced a semi- automatic pistol.
"It is a Beretta Modello," he whispered, "Italian. It was my father's. Where he got it, I don’t know, but he always kept it safe, and he handed it down to me."
He pressed the gun into her hand. She felt the cold surface, the rough contours of the grip, the sharp edge of the magazine where it protruded from the bottom of the gun. She had already procured the old revolver by that time, but hadn’t told the old man about it. It was her secret, and the war had thought her enough by then to keep a few of those to herself. He waited a moment, let her feel the weight of the Beretta in her hand, then continued.
"When the war ended and I came down from the mountains, back to Trebxinje, our house was gone. Burned down to ashes, only the cellar still there.” He stomped his foot down on the trapdoor to his own cellar, for emphasis while he spoke the word. “This gun is all I have left of him. He taught me to shoot it. Without bullets at first, quietly, in the darkness of the cave. Then later, a time or two." His voice trailed off, as if he had shifted to an inner dialogue, but hadn't noticed.
For the first time, Marina saw the heaviness of age on the old face, the deep depth of the creases around every feature. She waited. "Here," he continued, "You take it. It is loaded. It is ready to fire. My father gave it to me. I give it to you."
"I'll never let it go."
He stared at her. “No. Do not say such a thing. This gun, this… thing. It is a weapon. A tool. It has great value to me only when there is peace, when all is well. If ever a time comes when using it will save your life, I am very happy. But if ever a time comes when having it will endanger you, then cast it away. Drop it as if no thing ever had less value on the face of the earth. If it endangers you, then its purpose turns to dust. It becomes your enemy’s weapon then. Do you understand?"
She had nodded. He responded in kind. They sat there then, her hand wrapped around the handle, feeling the weight of it pinch her fingers between it and the worn tabletop. The old man sat beside her, his hand still gently pressing hers against the cold steel.
“If they catch you, you fight only if there is a purpose to it. If they rape you, you fight only if there is a purpose to it. If you can get away. If you can’t, then you take whatever pain they have to force upon you, but you survive it. Live on to spit on their memories. Curse them. But do not let them win by such means. Do not let them change the world. Find something that gives you some hope.” He patted her shoulder, twice, then returned his hand to the tabletop. Stared into past years, and thoughts all his own.
She could hear his breathing. She could hear
her own… happiness.
Almost happiness.
Across Ben's lap, she lay still and relaxed, her feet on the aisle seat, hips in the middle, and her head resting against the lower edge of the closed window shade. His arm was draped around her, just under her breasts, and the closeness, the smell of each other, was intoxicating, an opium dream; Ben set aside his fleeting feelings of guilt as he thought of Donna, and let the memory of her blend with the reality of the woman sleeping in his arms. Marina closed her eyes and let herself be held. A rare moment of vulnerability. Ben’s head eased down beside hers, his nose at the edge of her hair, eyes closed. He drifted near sleep, bathed in the scent of her and lulled by his own exhaustion. They stayed like that for a long while.
The man with the cane noticed Ben's head drop from view. Good for him, he thought, she's a real looker.
The plane had plenty of empty space on it — about half capacity he guessed — and it wouldn't be difficult to keep an eye on the traveling professor. Simple job, anyway, following a guy on an airplane. If there was any kind of trouble, any 'interference' as Bass had put it, the cane would give him an edge. He was sure Bass would be pleased with him. If trouble came, and he handled it well, there might even be a bonus in the job. Future work for sure.
He adjusted his belt. He had been drinking coffee for a full hour and a half prior to the flight, trying to blend in with the crowd. Now his bladder was full and growing more uncomfortable by the minute. Gela seemed to be asleep, or making a move on the woman. Either way he had be staying put for a while. Nowhere to hide over the Atlantic anyway. He got up and craned his neck to make sure the professor was safe in his seat. He was.
He left the cane leaning against his tray table and made his way to the lavatory, remembering to use the seats as support, keeping up the act of the sore leg. He hated the little rooms, but there was nothing for it; he wasn't going to make it another six hours without going.