Walking Dead

by Greg Rucka

  Some fifty miles out of Vegas, I turned off the highway, making south. Cropped buttes rose to the east and west as I continued away from the interstate. I began to see the first cautious indications of community again, faded road signs pointing me to places called Amber and Glassand. I even saw some green in the distance, where Lake Mead terminated into the Moapa Valley south of me, wresting fertile soil from the desert. Seeing the green would've given Tiasa hope, I thought.

  But Mesick hadn't taken her that far.

  A dirt road cut off the blacktop, heading east, and I followed it perhaps two hundred yards, the car leaving a cloud of dust in my wake. The road ended as insolently as it had begun, stopping without warning at two cinderblock buildings, each of them easily a sixth the size of the cottage I'd left in Ballygar. I stopped the car, letting the engine run, waiting to see if anyone would emerge from the structures. No one did. Neither of the buildings had windows that I could see. On the one furthest away, perhaps twenty meters, I saw a small satellite dish on the roof, and a compressor for an air conditioner.

  I killed the engine and got out. It was furiously hot, as bad as Dubai, but devoid of even the barest humidity, the sunlight bright enough to hurt the eyes. I waited, listening, but there was no sound, nothing. Not wind, not traffic, nothing. I might as well have been standing in a vacuum.

  The nearer of the two buildings, the one without the satellite dish, was unlocked. I pushed the door open, then stood in the doorway, waiting for my eyes to adjust. The stench of baked urine and shit washed out at me. I stepped inside, looking around, and quickly learned that there was almost nothing here to see. An empty plastic jerry can lay on its side by the door, and beside it a dented and weathered galvanized bucket. There were no fixtures, no sockets, and I doubted the building ever used power, let alone had been wired for it. I picked up the jerry can, stepped outside with it, trying to get fresh air, then uncapped it and gave it a sniff. There was no scent at all.

  I looked back into the building, stomach churning, and no longer from the smell. It wasn't a building; it was a cell. That was probably how it was done. Mesick or someone like him would bring a girl to the location, lock her into the building, then retreat. There were literally hundreds of places in the surrounding terrain where someone could set up overwatch and never be seen. Lying in cover with a pair of binoculars and a bottle of Gatorade, the watcher would confirm the delivery, wait for however long they deemed prudent upon the trafficker's departure, and then move in for the pickup.

  Meanwhile, a terrified girl would be trapped in a cinderblock hotbox. Here's a jerry can of water and a bucket to crap in, little girl, someone'll be back for you later.

  I threw the jerry can back inside, headed for the second building. The door was metal, same as the first had been, but this time was chained shut, the links held fast with a padlock. I pounded hard on it with my right fist, but there was no response. I thought maybe I was hearing a fan running. When I pulled on the padlock, it didn't give.

  I hadn't thought it would.

  Eight miles south was Glassand. I found a mom-and-pop hardware store and bought myself some bolt cutters, then went around the corner and found a mom-and-pop grocery, where I picked up two liter bottles of water. I finished one bottle driving back the way I'd come, returning to find that nothing had been disturbed. Even the dust had settled once more.

  The bolt cutters went through the padlock exactly the way they were designed to. I yanked the chain free and kicked the door open, nervous about what I might find. But there was no stench, no body, nothing like that. Just stale air being pushed around by the whirring air conditioner, and a folding table pressed against the far wall. On the table was a laptop computer, hooked to a power outlet. Another cable ran up the wall, presumably to the sat dish on the roof. Connected to the computer was a cheap cell phone, also on power from the outlet.

  I gave the room another looking over before moving inside, thinking that people this careful might well be the kinds of people who set booby traps. Nothing gave me cause for alarm—at least, not more than I'd seen already. I approached the computer, not touching it. A green light glowed at its front, and when I leaned my head down toward it, I could just make out the sound of its internal fans going, struggling to keep the machine cool. The monitor was dark. I looked at the phone next, again not touching anything, and it was on, and while the signal strength I was reading on its screen wasn't terribly strong, it was enough that I knew the phone had reception.

  I clicked the button beneath the trackpad on the laptop. The screen flickered to life, an ocean-green background and a password prompt. I considered, then typed in the words “you sons of bitches,” running them all together without spaces. I knew it wasn't going to work, and wasn't surprised when the computer told me as much.

  What surprised me was the message that followed.

  PASSWORD INCORRECT. TWO ATTEMPTS REMAINING.

  PLEASE WAIT TEN MINUTES BEFORE NEXT ATTEMPT.

  Then the screen went dark again.

  That was unusual enough to give me pause, to make me realize that I had, finally, hit a true dead end. The warning and the ten-minute wait said it all; however the computer was protected, it was serious encryption. I wasn't going to get through with blind luck or by trying to reboot the machine.

  I looked at the phone again, putting what was before me together with what I'd learned from Mesick. Whoever Arzu and he had dealt with on this end had outdone themselves in the anonymity department. Someone would call into the phone, and the computer would answer, then forward whatever message was left via either text or email. Whoever received the message could then respond with a text or email of their own, sent back to the computer, where it would in turn be routed to the initial caller.

  It was elegant and insulated and there was no way that I could see to crack it. All the phones concerned were certainly prepaid cellular, which meant I had no means to trace ownership, especially if whoever had set up the coms system was in the habit of changing the ones they used regularly, which was a given. Getting into the computer would take an expert and time, and while I could think of a few places to find experts in Las Vegas, while I might even be able to spare the time, in the end, I wasn't certain it would be worth the effort. The best I would get would be, perhaps, an archive of messages sent and received, none of which would be incriminating in and of itself. Any phone numbers I found would be useless.

  The other option I could think of, at the moment, was to look at the land, dig around in county records, find out who owned the buildings, who was paying the power bills. But like trying to chase down the numbers, I could see how that would end, too. Someone careful enough to have gone to these lengths for their coms wasn't going to drop the ball when it came to leaving a paper trail. Even if I managed to trace ownership back through one or two or however many shells and blinds, the odds were I'd end with a farmer who received a cashier's check promptly on the fifteenth of each month for the use of his land, and it was unlikely even then that he'd know who actually was sending him the money.

  It felt like Dubai again, and not only because of the heat. For a good five minutes, I stood in that stifling little room, wondering what to do next. I could only think of one thing.

  With the bolt cutters, I smashed the computer to pieces. Then I went after the phone. I told myself that I was doing it to put a dent in their finely tuned operation, that, if nothing else, it would slow them down a little while, at least until they found a new place, a new computer, a new phone. They would have to rebuild, set up new protocols. It would take time before they got their system up and running again.

  Just not very much time.

  For most of the drive back to Vegas, I didn't think much of anything. I felt tired, not just in need of sleep, but truly weary. The stitches in my side and forearm hurt, and the skin along my left palm had begun to itch in earnest, now that my hand was starting to heal. When I'd been swinging the bolt cutters, I'd maybe been swinging harder than I should have done
.

  I stopped for a meal at a diner on the way back to my hotel because I felt I should, rather than because I had any appetite for it. There were multiple racks of free newspapers, nothing more than collections of ads, just inside the entrance, almost all of them telling me that women with names like Juliette and Morgana and Devyne would be happy to take my money to make me happy. A couple of the ads actually used words like “fresh” and “young” and even “barely legal.”

  It made me think of Kekela, and then I was thinking of Tiasa yet again. When my meal came, I found I couldn't even bring myself to take a bite of it. I paid, left, picked up more water at a convenience store, and finally returned to my room.

  I didn't know what to do next.

  There were options, of course. Kekela had spoken of the “mongers” when we'd visited Rattlesnake, the men who frequented whores, who made it a game. There were mongers everywhere, certainly here in Las Vegas. With a couple of days, I could probably locate a few. With a couple of weeks, I could maybe earn their trust enough to find the specialists, the ones who knew where to find girls so young that, even in a state with legalized prostitution, they remained hidden.

  Or I could head back to Amsterdam. I could chase down Mesick, see if there was something I'd missed, something he had held back. I could go further, to Trabzon, and renew my acquaintance with Captain Çelik, and hope to grab more time alone with Arzu Kaya. I could rewind the clock all the way to Georgia, and hope that Mgelika Iashvili knew more than he'd said, had one last crumb for me to follow.

  Or you could let it all go, I told myself. You could just walk away.

  But even thinking that, I knew that I couldn't.

  One month of chasing after Tiasa Lagidze had led me here. Four weeks that had shattered the life Alena and I had built for ourselves, and in so doing, had also destroyed the walls I had put between the man I had been and the man I had become. Iashvili had said we were the walking dead, Alena and I, and he'd been right, but not in the way he imagined. Like Bakhar Lagidze, I hadn't left my past behind; I'd tried to bury it, alive and kicking, and it had come back on me the same as it had come back on him. Ten men dead by my hand in Batumi and Dubai was the proof.

  Everything had brought me here, the same way it had brought Tiasa.

  Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick.

  And one other person, at the end of the line. One person, and I didn't have the first idea where to look.

  Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick…

  It hadn't just been any supply chain, I realized. It had been their supply chain. I'd thought that the connection had been between Bakhar and Karataev, that there had been nothing to tie Bakhar to Arzu. Yet there was Arzu connecting to Mesick, and Mesick saying he had brought girls to the U.S., to Nevada, before.

  I opened the laptop, brought up Vladek Karataev's files from his BlackBerry, began going through the entries in his address book one at a time. There was nothing that looked like a phone number for somewhere in the States, certainly nothing that looked like one for Nevada. I combed through them a second time, and got the same result.

  But there had to be a connection.

  Bakhar's little black book was in the messenger bag, where I'd left it, and I dug it out, started going through it again. Same thing, nothing with a U.S. area code, nothing that looked like a number for Nevada. I went back to the listings from the BlackBerry, began comparing each entry, one at a time, alphabetically.

  Under the , Bakhar had an entry, “Pretty.” The number, at first glance, was for Ukraine, with a 380 country code prefix. The number ended in 207. When I checked Karataev's, I found an entry under the word krasívyj, which also meant “pretty.” The numbers weren't identical; Karataev's first four digits were different. But like in Bakhar's book, the number ended in 207.

  Reversed, the number began 702.

  702 was one of the two area codes in use for the state of Nevada. I knew that, because it was on the goddamn telephone on the desk right before my eyes.

  I had two possible phone numbers for “pretty” in Nevada. Whoever the hell that was. If they were still in service. If they were real numbers. If they weren't actually for somebody or some establishment in Ukraine.

  Using the BlackBerry seemed like bad luck, like tempting fate, never mind how many times I had changed SIMs on the thing. I used the telephone on the desk instead, hit 9 for an outside line, and dialed the number from Karataev's listing, thinking that one would be the most current.

  It rang. Four times.

  Then a woman said, “This is Bella.”

  “Bella,” I said. “I understand you're the person to talk to if I'm looking for some company.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-nine

  A month to the day from when Tiasa had been taken, I was once again on I-15, heading the same direction I had traveled the previous afternoon, but this time when I passed the turnoff to the drop site, I stuck to the freeway for another thirty miles or so. The sun was preparing to set, just beginning to bathe the desert in red and orange, when I drove into the town of New Paradise, following the directions I'd been given along Mesquite Avenue toward the northwest side of town. Lights were coming on, a few people emerging now that the temperature was beginning to descend toward tolerable.

  Calling the town New Paradise was potentially a contradiction in terms. A lot that I saw was obviously recent construction, streets of fresh pavement, and everything with a new coat of paint. A small casino, Paradise Rollers, anchored the main street on one end, new-school design with sweeping neon and elegant curves instead of a box with blinking lights. At the other end of the street was a well-watered and vibrant park, grass and trees and bushes and flowers. The water taken to maintain it could probably have irrigated a small third-world nation. It certainly all felt new.

  But if Tiasa were here, it sure as hell wasn't Paradise.

  There was an Albertson's at the corner of Mesquite and Sawtooth, the supermarket reasonably busy this time of day as people just off work stopped for groceries on their way home. I parked on the south side of the lot as I'd been directed to do, killed the engine. I'd been told no phones would be permitted, and so took the BlackBerry off my belt, stowed it in the glove box, and then waited. I didn't have to wait long.

  Less than a minute after I'd parked, a black Town Car pulled into the space next to me, the kind of vehicle normally used by car services. Its windows were tinted. I got out of my car, locked it up, and moved to the new one, climbing into the back.

  Inside were two men, one waiting for me in the backseat, the other behind the wheel. As soon as I'd closed my door, there was the thunk of the electronic locks.

  The man beside me was in his late twenties, Caucasian, with black hair. He wore blue jeans and a black fitted T-shirt, and from his biceps I could see he liked his barbell set. The watch on his left wrist was bulky and expensive, maybe platinum.

  “Mr. Twigg?” he asked, looking me over. I'd made a point, again, of trying to go with the right clothes for the occasion. Today that meant tan khakis and a short-sleeved polo shirt, the kind of thing a businessman closer to forty than to thirty would wear when relaxing. I wore a windbreaker as well, mostly to cover the stitches on my right forearm.

  “Yes,” I said. “That's right.”

  “Put your hands on the back of the seat in front of you, please, and lean forward.”

  I nodded my understanding, did as directed. The pat-down was thorough and immodest, and when it was finished, he had my wallet, an envelope of money, and my hotel key card. He passed the card up to the driver, who immediately pulled out a cell phone and used the number on the key to dial my hotel. I could hear the driver speaking to whoever answered, asking to speak to a guest named Matthew Twigg. While he was doing this, the man beside me was going through my wallet, checking my driver's license and credit cards.

  “There's a Matthew Twigg at the Gateway Suites,” the driver said, handing the key back. “No answer in his room.”

  The one beside me r
eplaced everything in my wallet as he'd found it, then opened the envelope. Inside were fifty hundred-dollar bills, and he counted all of them before stuffing them back into the envelope. He handed the money up to the driver, then handed my wallet and room key back to me.

  “I guess you're who you say you are, Mr. Twigg,” he said.

  “I don't know what to say to that,” I told him.

  The man smiled, friendly. “Nothing you can say. Mike, we're good to go.”

  Mike put the car in gear, and we started to roll. The man next to me offered his hand with a new smile, said, “Name's Bradley.”

  I shook his hand. “Matt.”

  “You can relax, Matt. It's not far.”

  “I'm trying not to be nervous.”

  “First time?”

  “Kind of. I, uh… I did something similar last time I was in Eastern Europe.”

  “That where you got our number?”

  “From a guy in the Republic of Georgia,” I said.

  Bradley's smile widened for a moment, almost to a laugh. “I hear that guy's a piece of work.”

  “To be honest, he kinda scared the shit out of me.”

  That earned a nod, and then Bradley sank back in his seat, apparently relaxing. I did the same, keeping one eye on what was outside the windows. We'd turned north, and, at first, I thought we were heading outside of town. We passed a New Paradise police car, parked outside of a strip mall Starbucks, then a school, then another strip mall. The driver, Mike, turned us east, onto a curving street called Oasis, and after half a mile we passed through an open gate, into a development of shiny new McMansions. Like the market in Vegas, the market in New Paradise had taken a hit. It was now dark, and I didn't see a single light burning in any of the homes.