JET - Forsaken

by Russell Blake

  “My concern is that now we know he tried to set me up, he’ll leak the information about our documents to the border guards out of spite.”

  Milun shook his leonine head. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll introduce you to one of the supervisors on the Hungarian side.” He hesitated. “For an additional charge, of course.”

  Jet nodded her understanding. “That seems only fitting.”

  “From there, you’re on your own. He sets his own prices for helping you. I’m paid for the conduit, nothing more.”

  “How much?”

  Milun calculated quickly and smiled wolfishly. “Fifteen hundred.”

  Jet’s eyes widened. “For an intro?”

  “It’s the difference between success and failure for many.” He shrugged. “But you don’t have to take me up on it. Maybe you’ll get across without any problems. The paperwork will be good. It’s more of an issue of whether someone’s feeling particularly proactive or you draw their attention for some reason.”

  “Like Ivan whispers to the wrong person.”

  Milun brooded for a long moment. “I’d like to say he wouldn’t dare, but the incident with the police gives me pause.”

  Jet understood the nature of the extortion, but she didn’t mind paying the toll if it meant they got into Hungary unmolested. Truth was, she’d have gladly paid triple that for safe passage, and the refugee passports had cost less than half what high-quality counterfeit Spanish or Italian documents would have cost, so she was still ahead. She shifted on the seat beside the portly crime boss and nodded.

  “As long as it buys a guarantee of no problems, consider it done.”

  Chapter 9

  Jet delivered the photos to Milun the following afternoon at his office – a bakery that specialized in elaborate special-occasion cakes, advertised on signs that looked like they predated the fall of the U.S.S.R. A middle-aged woman showed her to the back of the shop, where Milun was seated behind a large metal desk, bickering into a phone handset, obviously unhappy.

  He pointed to a chair in the corner of the room, and she sat while he finished berating someone on the other end of the call. After he slammed the phone down, he peered at her over a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses.

  “You have the shots?” he asked in greeting.

  “Yes.” She rose and set an envelope on his desk.

  He didn’t look inside, instead punching an intercom button on the phone and barking a name. An instant later one of the ponytailed guards entered, and he tossed the man the envelope.

  “Take these to Ivan. Call if you have any problems.”

  The guard nodded and departed, and Milun eyed Jet. “You have the money for the introduction?”

  “Yes. How is it going to work?”

  Milun waved to a small refrigerator to the right of his desk. “You want a soda or water?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Milun reclined in his oversized executive chair. “The Hungarians are only allowing one group of refugees across per day and limiting the size to a couple hundred, tops. Everybody in the EU gateway countries is overwhelmed, and the number trying to get in is increasing daily. They don’t have the personnel to handle the volume. My contact is the one who decides who gets in. Every morning there are thousands trying to get over, so it’s chaotic, but if he knows you’re coming, he’ll look for you and ensure you make it.”

  “How does he do that?”

  “You’ll fill out applications in the morning and submit them to an immigration official on this side, who’ll hand it to his Hungarian counterpart. My contact will take it from there.”

  Jet withdrew a sheaf of euros and counted off the fifteen hundred. She rose again and handed it to Milun, who pocketed it with a smirk that chilled her blood. She hated having to depend on him for this part of the journey, but she saw no other option and was left with only the hope that he would perform his part as expected.

  “Ivan should have the documents in two more days. Come by here at the same time then, and I’ll have them here. You pay me, meet my people early the following morning, and they’ll take you to the border.” He paused. “Where to from there?”

  “We haven’t decided,” Jet said. The less Milun knew about their plans, the more comfortable she would feel.

  “Greece is a train wreck, I hear, so I’d avoid it. Portugal, especially the Algarve, is lovely this time of year, though, and I understand it’s relaxed about checking bona fides if you’re free with your cash. I know people in most of the southern countries – France, Spain, Portugal, Greece… Let me know if you decide on someplace specific, and I can hook you up.”

  It was Jet’s turn to smirk. “For a price.”

  “Nothing in life is free. I have overhead. My products are information and access. Is it so distasteful that I charge for them?”

  “I have no problem paying for your services.”

  The phone jangled, loud as a fire alarm. Milun scowled at it and his glance flitted back to Jet. “Back to work. You know the way out. See you in two days.”

  Jet retraced her steps to the shop and paused at the display case. One of the workers approached her. “Can I help you?”

  “The Hello Kitty cake. Is it fresh?”

  “We made it this morning. All of our cakes are same day.”

  “What flavor is it?”

  “Chocolate cake with raspberry and chocolate icing inside. Raspberry and white chocolate outside.”

  A vision of Hannah floated through Jet’s imagination and she blinked once. “I’ll take it.”

  “Is it a special occasion?” the woman asked as she pulled the cake from the case and set it into a cardboard container.

  “Is what?”

  “The celebration. A birthday? Do you want something special on the cake?”

  “Oh. Um, no, just as it is. Thank you.”

  Jet left the shop with her parcel in hand and ambled toward the larger street, pleased with her impulse to get Hannah a treat. Uprooting the little girl from her life in Bosnia and taking her on the road was unsettling, and her daughter deserved a reward for enduring everything that their survival had required. Jet felt terrible subjecting her to the ordeal of posing as refugees, but there was little choice, and what was done was done. Her daughter adored Matt and seemed well adjusted in spite of her experiences, so she would be fine, Jet believed. Children were resilient, and as long as Jet and Matt treated their latest escape as an adventure, it would seem more exciting than anything.

  Of course she worried that her daughter had been scarred by the constant moving, but so far Hannah had shown no sign of it, for which Jet thanked Providence each day. Still, there were limits, and she wanted her daughter to grow up well adjusted, so the gypsy lifestyle had to stop. Soon Hannah would be an age where school and friends would be important, and Jet desperately wanted to settle someplace with a sense of permanence, where her daughter could just be a child and not have to be prepared to leave everything behind at a moment’s notice.

  Whether that was even possible, with a criminal CIA faction searching for Matt, and Jet’s numerous enemies looking for her, was unknown; but she owed it to the little girl to at least try. It broke Jet’s heart to consider a future of never-ending pursuit, not so much for herself, but for Hannah. It was times like this that she wondered whether she’d have been better off raised by the foster family David had arranged for, which in turn darkened her mood when she recalled how she’d been misled into believing her child had died at birth.

  She forced herself to snap out of the funk she felt enveloping her and made for a taxi stand she’d spied on the way there, returning to scanning the street to ensure there was nobody following her, the automatic impulse as natural to her as breathing. When she was sure she was clean, she abruptly switched direction and hailed a cab that was preparing to pull to the rear of the line and jumped into the backseat, ignoring the driver’s protest and handing him a high-denomination dinar note along with the address of a café a block from the
hotel.

  The young man’s objections vanished at the sight of the money, and he nudged the taxi into the rush of traffic while Jet peered through the back window until she was convinced nobody was in pursuit.

  “What’s wrong, lady? Forgot someone?” the driver asked, noting her behavior.

  Jet caught his stare in the rearview mirror and shook her head. “No. Got stood up for a meeting, that’s all.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  He seemed about to say something else, but Jet looked away, not wanting to encourage any further conversation.

  “It happens.”

  Chapter 10

  Baku, Azerbaijan

  Taymaz Hovel glared at the assembled advisors in the conference hall of the presidential palace from his position by one of the twelve-foot-tall louvered windows, where he was pacing nervously. The morning had brought a string of minor disasters: a food riot in one of the slums; a police shooting of an unarmed popular local activist during a traffic stop; a call from one of the powerful oligarchs who dictated terms to him in exchange for financial support for his campaign, as well as large donations to a numbered Austrian account whose owner was undocumented.

  That was all the expected business of government to which he was accustomed, and none of it fazed him. It was a system of power brokering and pay-to-play as old as time, where those in power milked the rest out of as much as possible while delivering the least amount of value they could. Hovel certainly hadn’t invented the game, but he’d refined the more unsavory aspects of it to a high art, and the possibility that he wouldn’t get another term during which he could loot the treasury and dole out favors chilled him.

  His chief of staff, Aydin Hasanov, was delivering a report on the unofficial polls, which had never looked worse. Of course, the results wouldn’t be published – the administration saw to it that only polls that showed Hovel far ahead made it to print – but his ability to stage-manage perception was waning to the point where he’d called this crisis meeting to discuss the situation.

  “In short,” Hasanov finished, “our numbers have sunk from bad to abysmal, and there’s a very real chance that no matter what we do, it will be obvious we didn’t win.”

  Hovel swatted the observation away like an errant fly. “We’ll stuff the ballot boxes, as usual. It won’t matter what the vote is, only what those counting the votes say it is.”

  “That could be a problem,” Hasanov countered. “The UN observers we’ve been forced to allow to monitor the election will be watching for it. Their presence changes everything in the precincts where they’re active.”

  “We’ll see to it that they’re only present in the areas we deem prudent. Simple.”

  Hasanov shook his head. “That isn’t how it works, unfortunately.”

  “It will be this time.”

  “They’ll pronounce it a sham before we even begin. We can’t afford the international scrutiny if they do.”

  “Then we bribe or blackmail them in the key polling places.”

  “Any whiff of impropriety will be reported. It will undermine our hold on power, even if we appear to win. We could expect widespread rioting and perhaps even civil war, with our numbers as bad as they are. Our strategists tell us that massive unrest is a very real possibility. We would have to use the army to quell it, but that would draw international condemnation and hamper our exports. Sanctions would be guaranteed.”

  “I’m not hearing cause for optimism,” Hovel complained. “What’s the solution?”

  “The people are fed up. They want regime change, sir. That’s the overwhelming majority sentiment.”

  “They’re ingrates, and uneducated fools at that. They shouldn’t be allowed to vote for dog catcher, much less president.”

  Hovel was voicing a common complaint whispered in the halls of power. The veneer of democracy and self-determination was a necessary charade to maintain order and evade sanctions for human rights abuses, but when the masses were allowed to voice their choice in a manner that resulted in an outcome that was different than the one desired by those with the necessary education and understanding of political realities, it was disastrous.

  The alternative was totalitarianism, which was attractive to Hovel, but after decades as subjects of the Soviet Republic, the population wouldn’t tolerate it. They’d tasted freedom and were unlikely to accept another yoke, no matter how much it might be in their best interests.

  “We’ll launch a more intensive public relations campaign,” Hasanov said. “Position editorials that opine that the country will devolve into depression if the nationalists are elected. All the fanfare about a change is fine, but when the average person reads that they’re going to suffer in the pocketbook, that might make a difference.”

  “The problem is that many who will vote against us are already poor and don’t trust the media,” Hovel griped.

  Nobody in the room dared to point out that they had no reason to trust the official mouthpieces that masqueraded as impartial press in the nation. They had long been co-opted by the regime and merely parroted whatever the official narrative was, often taking orchestrated sides of an issue to create the illusion of serious division of opinion – an effective mechanism to keep the population divided and powerless to act in any unified fashion. The issue Hovel had was that even the dimmest peasants saw through the manipulation now that the media’s portrayal of the state of the union differed so markedly from the reality with which the average person contended every day.

  Hovel’s administration had scored numbers so low as to rival those of the final days of the U.S.S.R., when everything from official sources was automatically assumed to be a lie. So a media blitzkrieg proclaiming the nationalists as a threat to the country’s future was likely to have slim, if any, effect.

  Still, they would go through the motions. Hovel was a keen student of human nature and understood that Lenin’s aviso to repeat a lie until it was assumed to be the truth was sound advice and had worked miracles for the world’s superpowers.

  “What about a terrorist threat? Something existential? That did the trick for our Russian comrades with Chechens, I recall,” suggested Surat Aliyev, Hovel’s Minister of the Interior.

  “I’m afraid the Americans have played that card too many times for it to be believable any longer,” Hovel said, his tone rueful.

  “How about anarchists? Hitler had the communists to blame. Why not anarchists? A series of seemingly pointless attacks on high-profile civilian targets for maximum outrage?”

  Aliyev had a point. Populations tended to maintain the status quo when they believed they were threatened. Change, which was what the nationalists promised, was welcome when there was no obvious enemy; but if trains or restaurants started blowing up, Hovel’s reputation as a stern master who could clamp down on the enemy might carry the day.

  Hovel smiled at the thought, but ultimately shook his head as he returned to the table and sat heavily at its head.

  “Not enough time. We have only three weeks to turn this around. That’s not enough. For a false-flag campaign to work, we would need months. And there’s always the chance the nationalists cry foul.” Hovel paused. “Part of the problem is the damned Internet. Hard to control the message when so many can access unofficial sources.”

  “We’ve already covertly clamped down on the most critical bloggers and sites,” Hasanov said. “Maybe we should knock out a major traffic hub so there’s an effective online blackout?”

  Hovel nodded. “It’s worth considering. Do we have anyone who could pull it off and make it seem accidental?”

  “Well, since we were discussing false flags…”

  Hovel frowned at Hasanov. “We would need a plausible reason that anarchists would target a hub, for starters.”

  Hasanov’s face fell, and then his expression brightened. “Because they’re anarchists! They want to cause mayhem and chaos. Pandemonium. So they’re attacking the infrastructure.”

  “The nationalists will
claim it’s us. No, that’s too easy to counter. It could backfire on us.” Hovel poured a glass half full with water from a pitcher on the table and took a sip before continuing. “I think we need to focus on controlling the vote counting. That’s the surest way of swaying things. We must ensure our people control the transport of the boxes to the counting stations. It’s the only way.”

  Aydin looked thoughtful. “We could always get voting machines for the critical precincts using the excuse we’re modernizing. The Americans pulled that off, and their population bought it. Everyone knows the code can be hacked or the memory cards fiddled, but we can just point to them as the model and insist everything’s legitimate. Even with sworn testimony in their Congress that there are backdoors to fiddle the results, they still use them, and only a few complain.”

  “Great idea, but we should have done it months ago. Again, any last minute change like that will smack of corruption and be countered by the nationalists. They’d never allow it – they’d block it, at least for this cycle.” Hovel absently tapped at his Patek Philippe watch and shook his head. “No, we do this the old-fashioned way. We buy off who we can and extort those we can’t. This election is too important to trust to the people.” Hovel pushed away from the table and stood. “We can get to the judges who will ultimately rule on the results. They all have families. If they won’t accept bribes, we point out their grandchildren might not make it home from school one day soon. There are few who will stand up to power if it means their loved ones suffer.”

  Hasanov’s brow creased. “It could get messy pretty quickly.”

  “I’m not saying play that card yet. But have it ready,” Hovel countered.

  “Then when do we approach them?” Aliyev asked, his expression puzzled.

  “Let’s see how the next week or so goes. We’ll want to be ready two days before the election, no earlier. Don’t give them time to think too much, or they’ll find a way out of the box.”