by Greg Rucka
I went to the desk, took out my laptop, and opened up the files I'd taken from Vladek's BlackBerry. He had contacts in Ukraine, it seemed, but whether or not any were in Odessa, I couldn't tell. Flipping through the address book on my screen, I saw Arzu Kaya's name again.
It had to have been he who'd pointed Vladek Karataev's friends at Alena, perhaps hoping he'd been pointing them at me. It had to have been he and not, as I'd begun to speculate, Zviadi. Zviadi had never known my name. But Arzu had dealt with David Mercer, and David Mercer had been known to live in Kobuleti.
Arzu was the only person I could think of who knew where Tiasa Lagidze had been sent. Hell, he could've held her back in Turkey, I could've been within a meter of her when I'd visited Trabzon, and I would never have even known it. But whether Tiasa was still in Trabzon or had been sold somewhere else, I was sure of one thing: Arzu was my only lead, the only chance I had left to find Tiasa Lagidze.
This morning marked two weeks, exactly, since Bakhar Lagidze's family had been slaughtered in their home. Fourteen days exactly, since Tiasa had been pulled from her bed and sold into slavery, a child bought and sold to pay for the sins of her father. I thought about Kekela and the girls she had led me to in Dubai, the abuse they had to have suffered in that foul, overheated brothel. It didn't matter who they were, who they had been, not any of them. No one deserved that.
No one.
I shut the top on the laptop, stared at the little light on the front of the machine as it began to pulse softly. Behind me, I heard Alena shifting in the bed. She was still asleep, her lips slightly parted, one arm drawn across her belly. For the moment, there was no worry on her face, just the peace of her slumber. When I'd first come to know her, her sleep had been plagued with nightmares, the subconscious upthrust of every pain she buried while awake. Over the last years they had come with less and less frequency, until, now, it seemed they were lost to history.
I was, in so many ways, a bad man. I had killed people, and I knew I was going to do it again. Sometimes, even oftentimes, it was in self-defense, or at least in situations where I could rationalize it as such after the fact. But once already in my life I had committed a murder, plain and simple, as calculatedly cold-blooded a killing as any Alena herself had performed while under the Soviet yoke or after, when she'd sold the only skills she had. I was not, by any stretch of my imagination, a good person.
Tiasa Lagidze hadn't known that the day in our little studio when she asked me to dance. She'd thought I was nice, and safe, and kind, and when she gave me a kiss on the cheek after we were done and then turned away from me, she'd forgotten one wall was all mirrors, and that I could see she was blushing.
She was alive, I was sure of it. Her worth as a commodity required it, and that was how whoever saw her now imagined her, the same way Arzu had done. Merchandise. She'd been turned into a consumer good, a color television, a stereo, a car.
From behind me, in the bed, Alena said, “Where will you look next?”
I turned. She lay exactly as she had before, only now her eyes were open. I left the desk and went to her side, sitting on the edge of the bed. Hair had fallen across her cheek, and I brushed it back behind her ear.
“I was thinking I'd go back to Trabzon,” I said.
“That is logical. It is the last place you know, for certain, that she was.”
“There's more than that. The man I dealt with there, I think he's the one who pointed Karataev's friends at Kobuleti.”
“All the more reason to speak to him.”
I brushed more of her hair back, let my fingers trail along the side of her neck. Like my own, her body had more than its share of scars, but her neck was smooth and I liked the feel of her skin. The bandage on her right tricep had come loose while she slept, falling away enough to reveal the top of the wound there. The bullet track looked like a burn.
“I don't want to leave you alone,” I said.
“Pregnant does not mean incapacitated. I can take care of myself.”
“You can, but I don't want you to have to, not alone. Not with Miata the way he is.”
“And.”
“And yes, the bun in the oven changes things, I think you'll agree.”
“Yes.” She rolled onto her back, looking up at me. Her expression was frank. “We could hire someone, perhaps. Some one who did what you used to do.”
“I'm not leaving you with some bodyguard I don't know the first thing about.”
“The problem,” Alena said softly, “is that everyone you ever trusted is dead.”
“No,” I said. “Not everyone.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-one
It took her less than a step into the apartment to realize something was wrong, and I heard it in the way she moved, even though the front door was out of sight from where I was seated. Then I heard the door shut again, and I listened to the deadbolt snap back in place, the jingle of keys as they were dropped onto the butler's table by the coatrack.
“Erika?” Bridgett Logan said, coming around the corner.
Then she saw me sitting in the easy chair beside the couch, and stopped cold.
“No,” I said. “Me.”
She stared, the surprise on her face quickly retreating, her features going neutral. Bridgett's poker face was good, always had been. One of the many things she hated was people knowing what she was feeling.
She looked the same as the last time I'd seen her, could well have been wearing exactly what she'd worn seven years earlier. Black motorcycle jacket over white T-shirt, never mind that early July humidity in New York made it an exercise in masochism to take on such a heavy layer. Black jeans that had seen enough of a washing machine to start turning them gray. Black biker boots, scuffed at the toes. A couple of bracelets wrapped tightly around her right wrist. Even the little gold hoop that pierced the side of her left nostril was the same.
But maybe an extra line or four to her face, the etching just a touch deeper at the corner of the arctic blue eyes. If gray had started trying to find its way into her black hair, she'd either dyed it into submission or eliminated it altogether, strand by strand.
“Atticus,” Bridgett Logan said, and the poker face went away, and she smiled at me, her teeth very white against her oxblood lipstick.
“Hello, Bridgett.”
“Wait right there, okay?” Her smile broadened, and she showed me her right index finger, indicating just one moment, then pivoted on her toe and headed past the counter that marked the edge of her kitchen, down the hall. I watched her go. At the end of the hall, she ducked right, into her bedroom, out of sight. For a couple of seconds there was silence, and then I heard her fumbling around.
“It's right here,” I said.
She stuck her head out of her bedroom, saw me holding up the Sig Sauer in one hand, slide locked back. With my other hand, I held up the magazine for the pistol.
Her smile, if anything, got larger.
“You motherfucker,” she said cheerfully, coming back down the hall.
“I didn't want you shooting me before we had a chance to talk.”
“That's all right, that's fine.” She had reached the kitchen, turning into it. I heard the sound of a drawer being opened, the clatter of cutlery.
“Bridgett.” I set the pistol and mag down on the coffee table in front of me.
“Shut the fuck up.” She found what she was looking for, turned, showing me a large carving knife, the blade maybe six inches long. “This'll do.”
“Bridgett,” I said again.
The smile was as bright as ever as she came around the edge of the counter. She was holding the knife all wrong, her right fist tight around the handle, blade pointing down, but I thought telling her that probably wouldn't help things much.
“You really going to stab me in your living room?”
“Yeah,” she said, bending her elbow and bringing the knife up to her shoulder. She was still far enough away that I wasn't sure she was going to do it. “I think I am, ac
tually.”
There was a knock at the door.
Bridgett stopped her advance, the knife still up.
“You should get that,” I said.
She looked in the direction of the door, then back to me, and the smile was no longer anywhere to be seen, most likely no longer in the borough of Manhattan, I suspected.
“Why?” she demanded.
“Because I think it's your sister, and I'm hoping you're marginally less inclined to murder me if there's a nun in the room.”
“I could keep her waiting in the hall, let her in after I'm finished.”
“That's true. Hard to explain, though.”
“I hate you,” Bridgett Logan informed me, tossing the knife onto her couch, and moving out of sight again, this time to answer the door. I heard her greeting her sister, a mock cry of “Cashel! What a surprise! Come in, come in!” and took the time to get up enough to move the knife from the couch to the coffee table, setting it beside the pistol.
Cashel came into sight first, Bridgett following her. Together, there was no mistaking the family resemblance, though Cashel was an inch or two shorter than her older sister's six feet, her eyes more gray than blue. She was wearing a tan blazer over a white blouse and black slacks, removing the coat as she entered. I could see the lapel pin on the blazer, the tall and thin rectangle with the engraving of a rolling hillside, a cross at its summit, the symbol of her order.
She smiled when she saw me, and unlike Bridgett's, it was genuine. “Atticus.”
“Hello, Sister.”
Her eyes caught the implements of death and pain on the coffee table, and the smile shrank, turned wry.
“Looks like you were correct,” Cashel said.
I shrugged.
Bridgett, nostrils flaring, glared at her sister, then at me, then back to her sister.
“You knew he was here? You knew he was in New York?”
“We met for coffee this morning,” Cashel said. “He said it might be best if I stopped by.”
Bridgett rounded on her sister, eyes blazing. “You know who he is? What he's become? This isn't the Boy Scout I told you about all those years ago.”
“I'm not sure he ever was,” Cashel replied, moving to the couch.
“You set me up.” Bridgett bounced her look between her sister and me once more, then decided she was angrier at me, which I thought was more than fair. “You fucking set me up.”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “But I have a reason.”
“It had better be a damn good one.”
“It is to me,” I said. “I need your help.”
“You have no right to ask for my help, Atticus! It's been, what, seven years? You made your choice back then. You made your decision, you walked away from everyone you knew, everything you were. You chose the bad guy over us. You have no right.”
“Not everything is black and white,” I said.
“Oh, forgive me, I thought murder was wrong, I thought it was, what's the word?” Bridgett turned to her sister. “What is it again, Sister? Oh, right! It's a sin! It's a fucking sin!”
Cashel made a slight face. I suspected Bridgett was being liberal with her profanity simply to annoy her younger sibling.
“God detests the sin,” Cashel pointed out. “Not the sinner.”
“Do you know what he's become?” Bridgett demanded. “Do you know what he does?”
“You don't know what I do,” I pointed out.
“You're a fucking assassin, Atticus,” Bridgett said. “Spin it however you like, you kill people for money, that makes you a fucking goddamn assassin.”
Cashel looked at me.
“I'm not,” I said. “Despite what your sister may have convinced herself of, I do not sell what I can do. Have I killed people? Yes. Will I do it again? If I have to, yes. I'm not proud of it. I'm not eager for it. But that's how it is.”
Bridgett ran a hand up the side of her face, into her hair, taking a fistful of it to tug. She let it go, shaking her head.
“I think you should listen to what he has to say,” Cashel told her sister.
“You don't know what he did.” Bridgett let her hair go, shoulders slumping. All of her seemed tired, suddenly, and her voice went soft. “You don't know how many of our friends died because of what he did, because of the choice he made.”
Cashel reached out for her sister's hand, gave her fingers a squeeze. “Listen to him.”
Bridgett snorted wearily, then nodded.
“Alena's in a hotel in Odessa,” I said. “She won't be there much longer, she's looking for a place to move to, to hole up. She's alone, and I need someone I can trust to be with her, to help keep her safe.”
Bridgett's expression turned to incredulity, the fatigue dissipating in a new wave of outrage.
“Fuck you.”
“She needs help.”
“Fuck you!” Bridgett appealed to her sister. “You know who he's talking about? You know who this woman he's talking about is? Even if you believe what he's telling us about himself, he can't say the same about her—”
“She's pregnant,” I interrupted.
Over coffee, when I'd told Cashel that Alena was pregnant, her response had been one of genuine pleasure.
Bridgett, not so much. I might as well have punched her, the reaction was so immediate and so physical. Her head snapped back, came around to stare at me. Her mouth opened, lower lip working, and then she closed it again. She backed up, bumping into the kitchen counter, put a hand on one of the barstools there. After a second, she took the seat.
“Yours?” she asked, finally.
“Yeah.”
“She's having your baby?”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head once more, muttering, before she said, “You don't need my help. That woman, pregnant? Anyone fucks with her they'd be dead twice before they hit the ground.”
“I need someone with her I can trust. Someone who can back her up if it comes to that.”
“And is it going to come to that?”
“I don't know. There's a chance. I've made some people very angry lately.”
“Not including myself.”
“More recently.”
“Why can't it be you?” There was the edge of new suspicion in the question. “She's having your baby, after all.”
“Because I have to find someone first,” I said.
Most of what I told Bridgett about Tiasa Lagidze I'd already told her sister when we'd met for coffee in the Bronx that morning. After arriving at Kennedy the night before, I'd checked into a hotel near the airport, traveling under the Anthony Shephard ID. Jet lag had me up before five, and I'd used my laptop to find a phone number for Cashel Logan, a Sister of Incarnate Love. It hadn't taken long, but I'd waited until after seven before putting in the call, asking to meet her.
Bridgett listened without comment, but with visible emotion. When I described the women I'd seen in Turkey, the girls I'd found in the brothel in Dubai, the fury writ itself large on her face.
“I've done some counseling with victims of trafficking,” Cashel said. “It's increased substantially in the last couple of years, as more and more cases have come to light, as law enforcement has become more aware of the crime.”
“There was that case in New Jersey,” Bridgett said. “Last year, it made the Times.”
“Yes. And the arrests in Kansas and Florida.”
“This girl could be anywhere in the world,” Bridgett told me.
“Maybe. Some places more likely than others. I've got a lead I need to chase down.”
“The experience is uniformly brutal, but it is survivable,” Cashel said. “You can recover from it, make a life again. But the longer the slavery, the harder the recovery. And the younger the victim, the more damage that has to be undone.”
“So you're going to rescue the girl, and you want me to protect the little lady?” Bridgett asked. “That's why you're here?”
“If you want to put it like that,” I said.
“I thought about it,” I answered. “But I can't trust them the way I can trust you.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“I've got nobody else.”
“And whose fault is that, Atticus?”
“No one's but my own.”
“You would say that.” She glared at me for a long time, then slid off the barstool. “Fuck it. I've always wanted to visit Ukraine. I'll go pack.”
We watched her disappear back into her bedroom.
“This girl, Tiasa,” Cashel said. “I may be able to help her, or at least put you in contact with people who can, wherever you find her. If you find her.”
“I'm going to find her, Sister.”
Sister Cashel Logan gave me a small smile.
“I'll pray that you do, Atticus.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-two
When we were waiting in the security line at Kennedy for our flight the next morning, Bridgett leaned in over my shoulder, whispering, “So what happens if I tell them Anthony Shephard is a guy named Atticus Kodiak?”
I gave it a second's thought. “I don't know. Want to try it?”
She snorted the exact same way Alena would've done had I said the same thing to her.
We cleared security without a problem.
In keeping with my newly established tradition, I used Vladek's BlackBerry, with a new SIM I'd purchased the previous day, to call the Londonskaya as we were waiting at the gate to board. Bridgett had gone off in search of a Starbucks, leaving me alone for the time being; at least, she'd claimed to be searching for a Starbucks. She might've been serious about ratting me out to the TSA, but that didn't seem very likely.
Alena answered before the second ring, and I told her where I was, and what the plan was, and who I was sending to back her up. When I gave the name, Alena swore in Russian.