by Greg Rucka
“We're going upstairs,” I whispered to him. “You first.”
Carefully, keeping the Beretta on him, we moved back into the inner hall. At the corner, I pulled him around, put him in front of me. He needed a hand on the wall to steady himself.
“Go,” I told him. “Keep it slow. Not a word, not a sound.”
He looked back at me with my gun, decided that was enough persuasion to do as I said, and began hobbling slowly toward the stairs. I followed a few feet before stopping, keeping distance, letting him lead me.
The stairs were hard for him, and his progress slowed even further. One step at a time, careful, painful, measured. It wasn't that different from how I'd have climbed the stairs, knowing what was waiting for me at the top.
Whoever was up there thought so, too.
The shots came at an angle, blowing through the drywall on the right-hand side, angled down, a long chatter from another assault rifle. Only a few hit the man in the dishdasha, and he slammed against the left wall, then tumbled back down the stairs in a heap, head over heels until he was sprawled on the floor, broken and dead.
I brought up the Beretta and waited. I didn't have to wait more than a minute, but it felt longer. Sweat slipped down my back and into my eyes, making them sting. Then I heard the floorboards creaking again, the rustle of movement, and I saw the feet on the stairs, black sneakers. Then the legs, the barrel of an AK, and that was enough for me. I put one from the Beretta into the left sneaker, heard the scream, watched the last man fall face-first down the stairs, onto the body of the man in the dishdasha. He'd managed to keep hold of the AK when he fell.
I shot him twice more, and made sure he'd never be able to use it again.
CHAPTER
Sixteen
There were eight girls in all. The eldest of them was around seventeen. The youngest, I think, was eleven. I don't know. I didn't have the heart to ask.
Tiasa wasn't among them.
I went room to room, telling them to get dressed as quickly as they could, trying to get them mobilized. Aside from the pregnant girl, there was another who understood my Russian, and a third girl who could manage in pidgin English. I asked if any of them knew how to drive, and the pregnant girl did.
“Where are you from?” I asked her.
“Volgograd.”
I gave her the keys to the Toyota SUV that I'd found on the man in the dishdasha.
“Go to the Al Maidan Tower on Al-Maktoum Road,” I told her. “It's easy to find, just follow the signs. Go straight there, straight to the Russian Federation Consulate, it's on the third floor. Take all of the girls with you. Tell them where you were, what they did to you. Leave me out of it.”
“I understand.”
Together, we hustled the girls out of the building, to the Toyota. The camp had begun to stir, and a couple of the men there watched us pass without expression or comment or apparent interest. The girls shuffled, some of them crying. Mostly, they seemed numb, very much in shock.
Before they were all loaded, I stopped one of the girls, the other one who'd understood my Russian. I'd seen her before, on Vladek's BlackBerry, the picture of her smiling as she believed his lies. It hadn't been more than ten days since he'd shipped her to Turkey, but all the same, I had to check the smartphone to be sure.
“Wait,” I told her.
She looked at me with alarm, the fear that had begun dissipating instantly in evidence again.
I brought up Tiasa's picture on the BlackBerry. She cringed at the sight of the smartphone in my hand, perhaps recognizing it as Vladek's, perhaps simply because of the association it held. She started to bring a hand to her face, to hide it from the camera, before she realized that I was trying to show her something on the screen.
“This girl,” I said. “Do you know her? Have you seen her?”
She shook her head, anxious.
“The man in Georgia,” I said. “The man who sold you, he sold her, too. That man can't hurt you. He'll never hurt you again. It's all right, you can tell me the truth.”
She bit her lip, then nodded.
“You remember her?”
“I remember her. Tiasa. She was… she cried all the time.”
“I was told she was here, that she came with you and some others to Dubai. Do you know where she is? Do you know where I can find her?”
The girl shook her head.
“You don't know?”
The girl looked to the SUV, where the others were waiting for her to join them. The engine started up. She looked back to me, afraid of telling me something I didn't want to hear.
“She didn't come to Dubai,” the girl said.
“You're sure?”
“She didn't come to Dubai.”
“Do you know where she went? Do you know what happened to her?”
“Please, mister…”
“Do you know where they took her?”
“No!” The girl was nearing tears. “No, I don't know, I swear. Please, please can I go? Please can I go now?”
I saw then that she was shivering despite the heat.
I helped her into the SUV. I closed the door. The vehicle pulled out almost immediately.
I looked at the picture of Tiasa Lagidze on the BlackBerry for a few seconds. Then I switched to check for messages. Like my search for Tiasa, the result was identical.
I had nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER
Seventeen
They'd burned my home to the ground.
I sat behind the wheel of the Škoda Danil Joshi had rented all of fifty minutes earlier at the airport in Batumi, listening to the engine idle and the rain beat against the roof, to the whine of the wiper blades swiping at the beads of water trickling down the windshield. It was after midnight, and the only illumination came from the headlights on the car, and while the picture was incomplete, it was enough, and I could feel my pulse beating in my temples.
The fire had burned hot. Blackened concrete broke through the rubble of charred wood and glass, the fractured pieces of the house's foundation. If anyone had come to fight the blaze, they'd come too late. It had been left to burn itself out. The only structure still resembling a structure at all was our little studio. Two of its walls and the roof had gone entirely. One mirror, cracked and charred, still hung within, reflecting light back at me.
The Benz, parked where we always parked it, was a burnt-out husk.
I got out of the car, into air bitter with smoke and the aftertaste of gasoline, the stench mixing with the new moisture falling from the sky. The rain was cold, but I didn't much feel it, because I'd seen something on the ground, glittering in headlights.
Shell casings.
Then I saw the discolored earth, and I knelt and touched it, brought my hand back so I could see my fingers in the light, a thin film of bloody mud on them now. I wiped my hand on my pants leg, standing up again.
Now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing a lot of shell casings, and at least one other patch of ground that might've been a blood spill. This one was much closer to what had once been our front door, and maybe it had come from someone trying to get inside.
And maybe it had come from someone trying to get out.
The Benz was a diesel, after all, and that wasn't what I was smelling. I was smelling petrol. I was smelling Molotov cocktails.
Gasoline burns exceptionally fast, and it burns incredibly hot. Fast enough that two or three or four thrown in the right places would create an instant inferno. Hot enough to bring a building to its foundation. If Miata and Alena had been inside, they wouldn't have had time to do anything much more than flee.
And then shell casings.
It was the Benz that scared me most of all, because it was still here. Whoever had burned our home had lit the car, too, stealing that avenue of escape. Probably had lit it at the same time they'd set fire to the house. So Alena had been here when they came.
It was now almost forty hours since we'd been meant t
o check in with each other, and still Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry gave me nothing but silence.
I was going to have to look through the ruins, I realized.
I was going to have to look for Alena's body.
After seeing the SUV on its way, I'd headed back inside and, as quickly as I could manage, gone through the rest of the building, looking for anything that might point to Tiasa's whereabouts. It was a fool's errand, and I was rewarded like a fool for it, coming away with nothing. One of the beds in one of the rooms actually had a sheet on it, and I used that to fashion a makeshift sack, loading it with every weapon I'd touched.
The keys to the new BMW sedan had been in the pocket of the last man I checked, the last man I'd killed. No more than ten minutes after seeing the SUV depart, I pulled out, cramming as much distance between myself and the work camp as quickly as I could, speeding back toward Dubai. Given the way most of the drivers handled the road, you couldn't tell I was in a hurry.
Back in the city, I continued past the hotel, turning off Sheikh Zayed and taking Umm Hurair to the Al-Maktoum Bridge, across the Dubai Creek. I turned off again, parking near the Dhow Wharfage. Despite its name, the Dubai Creek is not, in fact, a creek, but rather a major inlet from the Arabian Gulf, deep and wide enough that it effectively cuts the city in half. Traversing it requires the use of one of two bridges, a tunnel, or a ride on an abra, one the local water taxis.
I left the keys in the BMW, but took my sack with me, then found a waiting abra, piloted by a long, thin, and sandblasted old man. None of my languages worked on him, but he understood both my gestures and the sixty dirham I gave him well enough. We started out, angling more northward, toward the mouth to the Gulf. Once we were about midway across, I dropped the sack overboard. The old pilot watched me without a change of expression or a word. When we made the other side, I gave him another hundred dirham. He said something in Arabic, laughed, and pulled away.
I caught a cab back to the Marina, stopped at the concierge desk on the way through the lobby, and told the impeccably coiffed man working there that I needed the soonest flight I could get back home to Georgia, which was hardly a lie. Then I told him I'd be down within twenty minutes to check out, and he promised me he'd have something by then.
The room was as I'd left it, except that the maid service had come, and all of Kekela's things were gone. None of my belongings looked to have been disturbed, and it surprised me a little bit. It wasn't that I'd expected Kekela to rob me; but given how we'd parted company, and how bad the situation had looked for me, at least to her eyes, I wouldn't have blamed her if she had. Dead men don't need laptops, after all.
Whether she'd left my things alone out of respect for the departed or in the hope that I'd come to collect them, I had no way of knowing. It was unlikely I ever would. I wouldn't be seeing her again.
While I was settling the bill, the concierge presented me with the reservations he'd been able to find, apologizing profusely. The best he'd come up with was a flight from Dubai to Tbilisi, via Istanbul. That was workable, though not ideal. What was even less ideal was that the flight departed Dubai at a quarter of three in the morning. I thanked him, headed to the airport, where I confirmed that the earliest I'd be leaving the UAE for Turkey was at two forty-five. I booked a new connection from Istanbul, this time directly to Batumi. I spent the next eight hours checking my phone for messages and worrying, which had turned into the same thing.
I managed about an hour of sleep on the flight to Turkey. I didn't manage any on the flight to Georgia.
The journey from Dubai to what had once been my home took nineteen hours. It wouldn't have mattered if it had taken nineteen minutes.
I had arrived too late.
For a long time, I don't know how long, I stood in the rain, trying to get myself to move, to do what had to be done.
I just couldn't do it.
At some point, I found myself standing in what remained of the studio, looking at myself in the blurry and broken mirror. The heat had made fractures in the glass, including a major one that bisected my reflection, splitting my head into two broken pieces, out of alignment, out of proportion. The fissure ran down, tearing off a portion of my neck before jinking again, cutting neatly across my chest. As a visual metaphor, I thought it was spot-on.
Vladek Karataev's phone was ringing.
I took it from my pocket, stared at the display telling me that some Unknown Caller wanted me to answer. One of Vladek's business associates, maybe, calling to gloat. A wrong number.
I keyed the phone to answer, put it to my ear.
Her voice came soft and anxious, her strange mutt accent of all the languages the Soviets had made her learn. She was speaking English.
“Are you all right?” I had no voice to answer, and she asked it again. “Atticus? Are you all right?”
“I am now,” I told Alena.
CHAPTER
Eighteen
Kobuleti's chief of police, Mgelika Iashvili, lived by himself in a sweet-looking cottage off the town's main street, facing the beach and the Black Sea. In daylight, it was a brightly painted, almost garish, domicile, in baby blue and pine green with bright orange trim, colors meant, I presumed, to foster a sense of joyful beach festivities. At night, in the rain, it was monochrome and ugly, a gingerbread house that had been robbed of its treats.
I parked my rental across the street, killed the engine, and eyeballed the block. Most of the houses along the beach were rented to tourists during the summer season, now at its height. Lights burned in a few of them, including at least one in Mgelika Iashvili's home. By the clock in the car, it was three minutes to one in the morning, and the rain had finally stopped.
I got out, made my way across the street. There was nobody about, and the only thing I was hearing was the rustle of the Black Sea. A weak dome of light rose up from the south, where the clubs and cafés kept their doors open all hours. When I strained for it, I could catch an occasional thread of music through the noise of the tide coming in. With the departure of the rain, the summer warmth tried to return. If I hadn't been soaked to the skin, I might've been comfortable.
His car was parked out front of the house, rainwater dripping slowly off the fenders. I squatted down and took a look beneath, and the ground below seemed as wet as everywhere else. I put a hand to the hood, felt it cool, though it might've been the rain as much as time that was responsible for that.
I went to the door and raised my hand to knock, then saw it was already slightly ajar. I checked the street again, and nothing had changed, and I didn't see any vehicles parked nearby other than my own, and I didn't know what to make of it. Paranoia and common sense began to wrestle around in my skull.
Paranoia won, and I prodded the door open further with my foot, then slipped through as quietly as I could. The entrance dumped straight into a small living room, the layout not dissimilar to what my house had been. Nothing looked to be out of place, and it was clear that Iashvili had a taste for both the modern and the expensive.
I moved forward, passing the open door to the bedroom. Music was playing softly inside, some jazz fusion. When I looked I saw that the bed was unmade and empty. I held there for a second, listening for movement that wasn't my own, anything that would tell me if there was another body present, and nothing came back. He'd been here, had been here recently, but there was no sign of the man.
At the far end of the kitchen was the back door, ajar the way the front had been. An empty bottle of wine stood in the sink, along with a set of dirty dishes. Nothing was broken, nothing was stained with blood.
I went out the back, down a short run of stairs and onto the rocky beach, wondering if the chief of police had been expecting me to come calling.
“Where are you?” Alena had asked.
“Kobuleti.”
Her inhale was sharp in my ear. “It's not safe. Get out of there.”
I tried not to laugh, but the relief at simply hearing her voice made it impossible. I'm sure I s
ounded just shy of hysterical. “No kidding. Where are you?”
“Sochi.”
“Russia.”
“I had to take the ferry from Poti. I'm heading west tomorrow, I have a room booked at the Londonskaya, in Odessa, name Angelika Radkova.” She paused for breath, and I realized that tension was releasing for her much as it had for me. “Meet me there.”
“I will,” I said.
For a few seconds, we listened to the sound of each other breathing, the proof of life.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Men came. Three of them, just after sunrise yesterday. Iashvili called to warn me. He woke me up. Miata and I would have died in the fire if he hadn't.”
“He warned you?”
“Yes.”
“They weren't looking for you,” I said.
“Whether for me or for you, it doesn't matter. They came to kill whoever they found.”
“Either I owe Mgelika thanks, or he owes me an explanation.”
“Or both.”
I had stepped out of the ruined studio as we'd been speaking, now took another look around the place that had been our home for almost six years. I'd liked Georgia; I'd liked Kobuleti; I'd liked it enough that I'd been willing to spend the rest of my life here with Alena.
We'd never come back, I realized.
“I'll want an explanation before I consider gratitude,” I said. “He knew they were coming. He just as likely pointed them at you.”
“The Londonskaya,” Alena said. “In Odessa.”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Did you find her? Was she in Dubai?”
“No.”
“I'm sorry.”
“I'll see you tomorrow night,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Please.”
He was on the beach, maybe twenty meters from his home, and when I first saw him I thought he was dead, facedown near the edge of the tide.
Then I saw he was moving.