“Will that be enough? Last time they turned out to be largely useless. They cited numerous irregularities, but so what?” Guliyev asked.
“Gentlemen, we’re here to brainstorm,” Bahador said. “With the elections only a few weeks away, nothing is off the table, no matter how outlandish. Among all of you, a tremendous amount of power is gathered in this room. We need to understand the depth of your commitment and what support we can expect in a variety of scenarios – some of them highly unpleasant.”
Guliyev shook his head. “You talk like a gypsy, in riddles. If you have something to propose, spit it out or stop wasting our time.”
Sergei cleared his throat. “It has come to our attention that there are factions we may be able to work with, who can counter much of the president’s scheme,” he began, and continued speaking for five minutes. When he finished, the men’s faces were ashen.
The discussion continued well into the night, and by the time it broke up, fatigue was setting in. Calls were made and cars arrived to ferry the conspirators back to their homes, leaving Sergei and Bahador alone with their guards and their thoughts.
Sergei stood and moved to one of the cabinets, retrieved a bottle and two tumblers, and set them on the table as he sat beside the presidential hopeful. He poured each half full and then held his aloft in toast. Bahador clinked the rim of his glass upon Sergei’s, and they tossed the liquor back, swallowing the liquid fire without changing their expressions, the only hint of the strength of the drinks the moisture that welled in their eyes.
“So where does this leave us? Can we trust them to act?” Bahador asked.
“As much as we can trust anyone.”
“You sound unconvinced.”
“They’re loyal and brave, but they are men with hammers to whom everything looks like a nail. They seem resigned. My take is that in spite of everything we say, they don’t understand how critical this election is.” Sergei paused. “If Hovel continues to rule, the country is doomed.”
Bahador nodded. “I don’t disagree. But it was valuable to get a read on their reactions.”
Sergei poured another dollop in their glasses and shook his head. “And we planted the seed. Funny thing about the unthinkable – once you speak it out loud, put it out there, it becomes just a little easier to consider.”
Bahador offered a wan smile that looked like a wince. “You’re a keen judge of human nature. You can be sure their minds are working overtime now.”
“If they are, that’s half the battle.”
Bahador nodded again and raised his glass. “Then mission accomplished.”
Sergei sat back, a pensive expression clouding his face. “At least the first part of it.”
“All journeys start with a first step.” Bahador paused, took a swallow of his drink, and set the tumbler back on the table. “Let’s hope that we don’t have to go down a road we’ll all regret.”
“Sometimes the only way to build is to first destroy.”
The older man shook his head. “Maybe. But there’s no point to winning if we do so without the full confidence of the people. Stealing the election, even if it were possible, isn’t an option. We must be better than that, or we’re equally unfit to lead as our adversaries.”
Sergei nodded, having heard the rhetoric many times before. The Nationalist leader was an idealist – which was fine, as far as it went, but sometimes hindered him when faced with real world problems that required…moral elasticity.
Bahador tossed back the remainder of the fiery liquor and rose. “Come. It’s late, and we have a big day tomorrow. We shall slay dragons then. Now, we rest.”
Sergei watched as his master strode to the door and swung it wide, his shoulders squared like a prize fighter ready to step into the ring, and his chest swelled with pride that he was the great man’s most trusted confidant. Sergei finished his drink and rubbed a tired hand across his face before joining Bahador and the guards, keenly aware that as the clock counted down to the election, they were on borrowed time.
Chapter 4
Jet adjusted her hijab and checked her watch a final time before planting a kiss on Matt’s cheek and moving to the door. Two days had crawled by, but in twenty minutes she was to pick up their paperwork. Photos of herself, Matt, and Hannah were secreted in a small envelope in her pocket along with the second half of the payment in cash.
“You sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Matt asked.
“Absolutely. It’s best if you aren’t seen. Just in case.”
“You think something’s off about the forger?”
“I don’t know what to think. I just know that it’s getting more tense out there by the day as more refugees arrive, and eventually something’s going to trigger blowback. I don’t want you and Hannah on the street any more than necessary.”
They’d remained in the room most of the time, taking their meals, barely edible slop at egregious prices, downstairs in the communal dining area, where they were safely insulated behind locked doors. When they’d gone for their photographs, Jet had heard several insults hurled their way by young men as they’d walked past, and had squeezed Matt’s hand so he wouldn’t react. Best to pretend not to understand than to engage. They weren’t there to change minds, and this wasn’t their battle.
“You have your phone. Call mine if you run into trouble,” Matt said. They’d bought burner cells when they’d arrived in town, and had only used them to confirm they worked.
“I will.” She took in his pensive frown and kissed him again. “Don’t worry. This is a cakewalk.”
“I suppose it doesn’t do any good to tell you I get more worried when you tell me not to worry, does it?”
“I can take care of myself.”
Matt nodded. “I know.”
After kissing Hannah, Jet let herself out and took the stairs two at a time, breathing slowly, her pulse barely above normal. Being cooped up in the small room was driving everyone stir-crazy, which accounted for Matt’s uncharacteristic fretting. They both knew she was capable of taking on an army without breaking a sweat – so his concern, while touching, was unnecessary.
Because of its cheap shops and restaurants, the district attracted more refugees than the upscale areas, and the streets were clogged. The Syrians were easy to pick out from the Serbs, marked by their gaunt faces as well as the Arabic that drifted on the breeze as she pushed past clumps of men with the slack gaits and hunched shoulders of those with no place to go, no work to do, no money to spend.
When she arrived at the forger’s block, she slowed and scrutinized the vehicles crammed together along the curb, checking for obvious signs of surveillance but seeing nothing. Her eyes roamed over the windows of the buildings lining both sides of the street, but it was impossible to be sure of anything, the national pastime of the elderly apparently watching the world go by from their perches like geriatric owls. She didn’t pick out anything that triggered her internal alarms and so continued to the forger’s stoop, which thankfully was empty, the thugs gone to greener pastures this afternoon.
She mounted the steps, entered the building, and waited for her eyes to adjust before making her way to the stairwell. A creak from one of the ground-floor tenements ahead stopped her, and she found herself staring at the wide eyes of a toddler scarcely older than Hannah, her black hair matted to her head, dressed in a stained pink top emblazoned with a faded Hello Kitty graphic. Jet smiled but the child was gone, replaced by a frowning woman in her forties clutching a wooden spoon.
“Get in here,” the woman commanded, and then the door slammed, the sound as loud as an explosion in the hallway. Jet shrugged to herself and reached for the bannister railing, anxious to avoid any further encounters with the residents, already feeling too exposed and, worse, weaponless.
Eric answered her knock with a silent glare and stepped aside so she could enter. Jet made for the front room, and he followed her in. The ever-present cigarette trailed a noxious plume.
“You have the
money?” he snapped, by way of greeting.
Jet nodded. “Assuming you have the documents. I pay when they pass muster, not before, remember?”
His eyes narrowed. “Your Serbian is better than the previous visit.”
Jet held his stare. “I’ve had time to practice.” She held out a hand, remaining standing by the sofa, uncomfortable with Eric’s sudden tension. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Show me the money.”
Jet debated refusing, but saw nothing to be gained by doing so. If he was going to rob her, he likely wouldn’t do so in his apartment. She extracted the wad of euros and waved it at him before slipping it back into the folds of her robe. “There. Now let’s see your work.”
Eric grunted and disappeared into the back of the apartment before returning with a file folder and placing it on the coffee table. “Have a seat. I just need to affix the photographs and laminate the pages, and you’re done. You remembered to get them, right?”
Jet continued standing as she reached for the file. “Of course.”
She reached down, slid a blue booklet from the file, and opened it. Her eyes roved over the pages as Eric stood by, waiting. When she looked up at him, her stare was cold. “This is junk,” she said. “Garbage. I’ve seen real ones online. This is obviously fake.”
Eric blustered indignantly. “Nonsense. It’s perfect. You must not be familiar with the newer ones.”
“The newer ones have machine-readable code along the bottom. Yours doesn’t. And the font’s all wrong. That, and the pages don’t have the watermark the genuine article does. This wouldn’t fool a two-year-old.”
“Lady, I did the work. I expect to be paid,” he snarled.
“I want my money back.”
A switchblade materialized in one hand. “Hand it over, or you’ll regret it.”
Jet reflected on her vow to avoid trouble and then pivoted and drove her booted foot into his midsection. His eyes saucered and the cigarette blew from his mouth with a woof, and he dropped the knife to the floor as his knees buckled and he sank to the floor, struggling for breath. Jet calmly toed the switchblade aside and it skittered behind a chair. She held up the file. “What did you make these on? Where’s the computer?”
Eric gasped, his face red, and pointed down the hall. “There…” he managed.
Jet nodded. “Show me.”
The forger pulled himself up using the chair, and Jet caught the cunning in his sidelong glance, telling her he wasn’t as badly winded as he appeared. She took a step back to give herself more maneuvering room, wary of another attempt, but the fight seemed to have gone out of him, and he stumbled down the hall toward the bedroom. Jet stayed on his tail and then pushed him hard in the middle of his back when he reached the door, keeping him off-balance. He staggered into the room, where she spotted a laptop computer on a small table beside a cheap printer.
She pointed at the bed. “Sit down. You move, I break your legs.”
His eyes said he believed her, and when he was seated on the edge of the bed, she moved to the laptop and did a quick skim of the screen. Nodding to herself, she powered the device down. The forger glared hate at her.
“Now you’re robbing me?” he snapped.
“Where’s my money?” she demanded, ignoring his question.
“I…It’s gone.”
“Then I’m not robbing you. I just bought your laptop. I gave you enough for five of these, so it was a pretty good deal for you.”
“You can’t do that.”
She disconnected the computer and regarded a rack on the closet door. “I’m going to bind your hands and feet and gag you. Try to fight me and you’ll regret it.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“You pulled a knife on me, and you tried to cheat me. You’re lucky I don’t use the blade to carve my initials into your face.”
She moved to the belts hanging from the rack, selected a thin one, eyes on him the entire time, and then approached him. “Turn over on your stomach, hands behind your back. Try anything and you’ll be pissing blood for weeks.”
Eric grudgingly complied, and Jet made short work of his wrists and, after retrieving another belt, his feet. She finished by knotting a tie around his head, gagging him, and then stood back to inspect her work.
“I’ll tell your cousin you need help when I get back to the inn. I’ll also tell her you tried to rip me off,” Jet said.
Eric grumbled something unintelligible from behind the tie, and she took a final look at the bindings and returned to the foyer, notebook and file in hand. She listened for a long moment and then eased the entry door open. The hall was empty as when she’d arrived. Jet pulled the door closed and crept toward the stairs.
At the first floor, she fished the cell phone from her pocket and called Matt. He answered on the fourth ring, and she summarized her meeting in a few clipped sentences.
“So dead end,” Matt said.
“Right.”
“Are you okay?”
“So far. Pack our things and get Hannah ready to go. We’ll want to blow out of there when I arrive.”
“It’ll take me ten minutes to get back to the room,” Matt said. “I took Hannah out for a snack. I can meet you somewhere if you want.”
She considered it and frowned. “I need to pull the hard disk and wipe the cache on this computer, and it would be nice to have some privacy. Let’s meet at the inn.”
“We can be ready to go in a blink – it’s not like we have a ton of stuff to pack.” Matt paused. “Back to square one on the docs, though.”
Jet eyed the entryway and nodded. “I know.”
She signed off and slipped the phone back into her pocket, and then made for the stoop. The pair of thugs had returned and looked her over with exaggerated leers. She avoided eye contact and pushed past them, ignoring their obscene proposals as well as the impulse to break their jaws, and hurried down the sidewalk before it could occur to them to wonder why she was toting a laptop and a file.
The skin on the back of her neck prickled as she traversed the block, and she paused at the corner to check over her shoulder. The toughs were gone. Where, she didn’t know, but she wasn’t interested in pressing her luck. She ducked around the building and picked up her pace, anxious to be in and out of the inn before Eric could work himself free and sound the alarm, assuming he had sufficient network to do so. He wouldn’t go to the police, she was sure – his work was so amateurish there was no way he’d been forging for long, so he was unlikely to have developed law enforcement contacts. But there was always the possibility a distant relative was on the force, and she wanted to take no chances. Jet hurried along, hoping that her feeling of being watched was just nerves and not something more substantial.
She stopped abruptly at a shop and eyeballed the street in the reflection of the display window, but there was nothing out of the ordinary – nobody making sudden moves, no cars inching along, no one darting into doorways or stopping for no reason; in other words, nothing to fear.
The thought brought her no comfort. A simple transaction had just gotten far more complicated, and now they would need to find a different place to stay and begin their hunt for a forger anew, this time with no leads. She resumed walking, picking up her pace as she reached the main boulevard, and swallowed back the resentment at having had two precious days wasted with nothing to show for it but unusable junk and a building sense of anxiety that soured her every breath.
Chapter 5
Elena looked up from her position behind the reception desk when Jet entered and offered an uncharacteristic smile. Jet returned it, faking as much warmth as she could muster, and hurried to the stairs. Elena called out as Jet neared the steps.
“So how did it go?” the older woman asked.
“Everything went smoothly,” Jet lied.
Elena eyed the laptop under Jet’s arm and her brow furrowed. “What’s that?”
“Oh, my computer. I use it to read. I wasn’t sure how
long I’d have to wait.” Jet glanced at her watch. “Anyhow, thanks a million, but we need to get going. Now that we have our papers, there’s no point in delaying, you know?”
Elena frowned and checked the time. “Right now? It takes a good long while to get to the border, and you don’t want to have to wait overnight. They only let a few people through every day.”
“Thanks. We’ll think about it.”
Jet didn’t want to continue the discussion and pretended not to hear when Elena said something else. She didn’t trust the woman’s sudden friendliness, and the knot of tension that had been twisting in her gut tightened as she climbed the stairs.
Once inside the room, she did a perfunctory inspection of their bags and the dresser, and her lips pressed into a thin line. Someone had gone through their things, which confirmed her suspicion that the innkeeper was in on the fraud. Elena wouldn’t have found anything of interest – Jet always took her passports with her when she left the room and carried the diamonds in a satchel hanging from a lanyard around her neck – but it was clear they were in danger, her instinct to be rid of the miserable boardinghouse vindicated.
Matt entered with Hannah in tow a few moments after Jet had removed and pocketed the hard disk from the laptop, and Jet held a finger to her lips and leaned into him.
“They searched our bags. Pack your duffle and I’ll deal with Hannah’s stuff. I want to be out of here in two minutes,” she whispered. “It’s a matter of time until the forger gets loose, and I don’t want to push our luck. Hurry up.”
Matt nodded and wordlessly stuffed his few possessions into his bag while Jet did the same with her daughter’s clothes and books and handed Hannah the small children’s backpack before packing her own with her clothes. When she was done, she looked up at Matt, who was peering through the curtains at the street below.
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