Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  “Yeah? Tell her it’s a little fucking late.”

  “We could always go to the other guy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But maybe Sinisa’s right. Maybe this is good luck.”

  Talena shook her head. “I don’t like it. I’d rather just pay him. We just happen to show up at his door when he needs a programmer? No way. There’s something else going on.”

  “Maybe so. But this way I’ll be able to keep an eye on her, make sure she’s safe.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to let you go?”

  “He knows I’ve got friends in NATO,” I said. “That helps. And he let me go before, remember? That’s something.”

  “I don’t trust him. He’s too smooth. And he’s a Serb. I know that sounds crazy but it makes a difference around here, it really does, he’s a Serb and Saskia and I are Croats, it makes a difference. I don’t trust him.”

  “Me neither. But I trust the alternatives even less.”

  We looked at each other for a moment.

  “Besides,” I said, “you know, I need a job.”

  She quirked a smile but her expression turned serious in a hurry. “He’s a criminal, Paul.”

  “You remember some of the dot-coms I worked for? This dude can’t be any worse.”

  “I’m serious. Never mind how slick and charming and Western he is, never mind his nice suit. He’s a monster too. Probably no better than Dragan.”

  “Yes. I agree. He’s probably a monster. And I’d be helping him. And I’d have to trust him to let me go after. But if he’s telling the truth I’d also be getting Saskia not just out of here but into America. And I think he is telling the truth.”

  “There’s a whole lot he’s not telling. Why would he need someone like you so badly?”

  “Kind of curious about that myself,” I admitted. “But he’s not exactly in the world’s most transparent business. He’s given us a pretty good offer. Maybe we’re dealing with the devil, but you know, why the fuck did we let him give us a ride out here in the first place, right? So he’s a monster. Maybe he can be our monster for a little while.”

  “You want to accept.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” Talena said, nodding. She passed the decision on to Saskia, who closed her eyes and smiled with relief, and turned back to me. “Then we’re all staying here.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said quickly. “You’d lose your job. You have to go back.”

  “Never mind my job, Paul, this guy is dangerous, you could lose your fucking life.”

  “An even better reason for you not to come with me. So you can orchestrate help from outside if we need it. If he does fuck us over then you won’t be able to do much good if you’re sitting helpless in his clutches too.”

  “Paul, there is no way I’m going to fly back to California and leave you and Saskia all alone with this Serb smuggler with nothing but his word protecting you. End of discussion.”

  “What if he does turn on us?” I asked. “What good will you be here?”

  She didn’t have any answer to that.

  “One of us has to stay away from him,” I said. “It can’t be me, it can’t be Saskia, so it has to be you. I’m sorry. I know you want to stay here. But if you do, you endanger both of us.”

  Try as she might, and she tried, she couldn’t think of a counterargument to that.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It probably sounds more scary than it is. I bet it’ll just be another boring programming job. I’ll be craving danger after three days but all I’ll get is bug hunts.”

  She didn’t seem convinced.

  “So it’s settled,” I said, barrelling on before she could think of some other reason to protest. “We accept the offer,” I paused as a brainwave hit, “well, sort of, and then Saskia and I stay here, I work on a job that will never ever make it onto my resume, you go home, and we meet up in six weeks. Piece of cake.”

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  I led Saskia and Talena back to Sinisa.

  “One condition,” I said.

  His expression darkened. “I do not like conditions.”

  “Twenty thousand US dollars deposited into my American bank account. Half today, half when the job is done.”

  He looked at me, appalled and insulted, though I suspected both were negotiating ploys. “Absolutely not. I am already being far too generous with you, Mr. Wood. Do you know how much passage to America would cost if I were to allow you to simply buy it? Fifty thousand dollars!”

  “How interesting. Do you know how much expert coders cost per hour in California?”

  He sighed. “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Fine.”

  We shook hands. To him it was obviously petty cash.

  “Will Talena be staying here with you?” he asked.

  “Talena will be flying back to California tonight,” I said.

  Talena looked like she very much wanted to object, but she stayed quiet.

  “All right,” Sinisa said. “Arwin. Take his bank details and arrange the transfer for my authorization.”

  Talena and I followed Arwin back to the pickup and watched him unfold and launch the laptop. I was in a bit of a daze. I had just agreed to join a criminal conspiracy of Bosnian thugs. Talena would be leaving me tonight. The future had become a gray and unknowable void.

  “Tell me everything you know about the bank,” Arwin said. “I should be able to find the SWIFT code online, if they’re –”

  Arwin was interrupted by Zoltan, who stood atop the cab of the Mitsubishi pickup, keeping watch. He barked something which made the previously unflappable Sinisa pause for a moment, then turn, vault atop the Land Rover, and look where Zoltan pointed.

  “There are cars stopped at the cemetery entrance,” Talena said to me quietly. “Men are getting out of them.”

  After a moment she and I followed Sinisa up to the hood of Land Rover and looked around. There were nine men climbing towards us. They had divided into three groups, coming from three different directions. One of the stopped cars was a battered diesel Mercedes with a visible zigzag crack across the windshield.

  “That’s Dragan’s car,” Talena said, just as I was thinking it.

  Saskia emitted a tiny, barely audible whimper of terror.

  The three groups approached from different directions, west and north and east. They carried shotguns and Kalashnikovs, and they moved fast, with military discipline. They would reach us in a few minutes. As they passed, a half-dozen kids playing soccer on a green patch near the entrance picked up their ball and scurried away. Startled mourners backed away and fled out of the graveyard. Trouble was brewing, anyone could tell.

  “Friends of you?” Zoltan, the uber-thug atop the Mitsubishi, asked me with a thick accent.

  I considered lying. I doubted Sinisa would be willing to get into a firefight for our sake, especially when he was badly outnumbered. But it wouldn’t take long to figure out why they were here. Might as well go down telling the truth.

  “They’re after her,” I said, nodding to Saskia, who stood with fists tightly clenched, looking from me to Talena and back, her eyes blank with terror.

  Talena said, “Paul. We should run. Now.”

  Behind us, to the south, the ground sloped downwards for a few hundred metres, then, just past the graveyard’s perimeter fence, it rose abruptly into a steep rocky slope. A thin ribbon of dirt path wound its way up that slope.

  “That is what they want,” Sinisa said to her.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “Basic tactics. They would not come like this unless they wanted to drive you that way. There are more of them waiting on top of that path, I assure you.”

  If he was right then we were surrounded. I reached for my phone.

  “Who do you call?” Zorana, the redheaded woman who had greeted me in the factory, asked sharply.

  “NATO.”


  “You have interesting contacts,” Sinisa said. “We must discuss them someday.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “If this isn’t my last day on earth that is.”

  “Hang up,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do not call them. I would prefer not to owe Major Botham any perceived favours.”

  “Well, I would prefer not to be dead.”

  “You will be fine,” he said. “Everything is under control. Trust me.”

  He looked at me and waited, calmly and patiently, as if nine armed and extremely dangerous men were not within a minute or two of arrival. I paused. My finger hovered over the DIAL button. We were surrounded and outnumbered. Sinisa was a professional criminal and therefore completely untrustworthy. Maybe he was the one who had called Dragan here, was deliberately betraying us. It was entirely possible.

  But if that was the case we were dead anyway, it didn’t matter whether I called or not. If Sinisa didn’t help us we would be dead well before NATO ever showed up. Mistrusting him was no longer an option. I pushed CANCEL.

  “Good,” Sinisa said. He switched to Serbian and started barking orders. Zoltan, Zorana, Mini-Hulk and SRG took positions behind the vehicles and the bigger marble tombstones. Arwin folded the laptop, replaced it in its case, and got into the Mitsubishi. Sinisa vaulted nimbly to the ground.

  “Get inside,” he said, patting the Land Rover fondly. “Fully bulletproof, solid rubber tires. But do not get too comfortable. They may have grenades. Tell me, who are these men?”

  Talena and Saskia and I climbed onto the Land Rover’s leather seats. Talena had to help Saskia, who was numb and shivering.

  “They’re called the Mostar Tigers,” I said.

  Sinisa stiffened with surprise. My stomach clenched with fear. He had heard of them, and not in a good way. Now, I was suddenly and terribly certain, he would decide to abandon us to our fate rather than fight the Tigers.

  Instead he rolled his eyes, drew his cell phone, and said “Good God almighty, why can nothing ever happen the easy way?”

  We could see them in the distance now, nine men fanned out in a semicircle like pack animals on the hunt, moving with coordinated precision from tombstone to tombstone, using them as cover. Dragan and the Tigers, with more waiting atop that path, maybe all fifteen of them were in Sarajevo, he must have called in reinforcements from Mostar.

  Sinisa joined us in the Land Rover, in the driver’s seat, still holding his cell phone to his ear. He opened the window a finger’s width, and we waited.

  Sinisa’s eyes were alive with excitement, and muscles jutted from his neck, but he seemed otherwise calm. Saskia’s eyes were closed and every breath was a soft groan. Talena and I were somewhere in between; my right leg twitched nervously, she wound a loop of hair around a finger and pulled hard enough that it had to hurt, both of us taut as guitar strings but still in control. I was intensely aware of all my senses, the rich smell of leather, the sound of Saskia’s breathing, the soft textures of Talena’s hand as I took it in mine.

  They stopped about fifty feet away from us, sheltered behind gravestones.

  Sinisa had a quick muttered conversation with his phone.

  Then Dragan’s bellowing voice sounded. Talena muttered a translation into my ear.

  “We want the Canadian and the two women!” he shouted. “Give them to us and we will all leave this graveyard alive! If not, that Land Rover will be your mausoleum! We are the Mostar Tigers! I am Dragan Kovacevic! The woman, Saskia, she is mine! She is my wife! I will not rest, not a single day, not an hour, until I have my woman back, until I have my revenge and the streets run red with the blood of my enemies!”

  That last sounded much too poetic for Dragan, but Talena assured me that it was fairly basic hyperbole around these parts, sort of the Bosnian equivalent of “Yo’ momma.” Sinisa lowered the window a little further and called out a reply.

  “The Mostar Tigers,” Talena translated. “I know of you. Perhaps you know of me. My name is Sinisa Obradovic.”

  There was a pause.

  “I know who you are,” Dragan said, his voice suddenly less strident.

  “These people are under my protection. Leave while you still can.”

  “If you know of the Mostar Tigers, you know we never run from a fight.”

  “This is no fight. This is suicide.”

  Dragan laughed. “Bold words from a man surrounded and outnumbered.”

  Sinisa muttered something else into his phone. I looked at Talena, who shrugged, she hadn’t caught it. Sinisa then closed his window, interlaced his hands behind his head, and leaned back in the leather seat, a slight, confident smile on his face. I began to wonder if we had turned ourselves over to a deranged megalomaniac.

  There was a loud crack, not gunfire, more like a big log snapping in two. Then another, and another, and I caught some kind of puffing motion out of the corner of my eye. I looked out at the graveyard. Something flickered in the distance. I blinked. One of those marble obelisks, over by the Tigers – had one of those just vanished?

  Another loud crack, and this time I saw the top half of one of those marble spires disappear into a puff of dust and gravel. Then another. And another. Somebody in the distance, one of the Tigers, yelled with rage and fear.

  Sinisa spoke into his phone, and the pace of destruction accelerated. All around where the Tigers huddled, grave markers snapped and burst and fell to the ground. It was like watching loggers clearcut a forest. I covered my ears against the piercing cracks, feeling slightly guilty about the desecration, but only slightly. Better to destroy others’ tombstones than to qualify for our own.

  Finally Sinisa spoke a single word into his phone and the onslaught stopped. My ears rang like I had spent the day front row center at Lollapalooza. A stunned silence hung over the cemetery.

  Sinisa lowered the window and shouted.

  “You have one minute to leave,” Talena translated, “before my snipers stop shooting at stones and start shooting at you.”

  There was no immediate response. I wondered where the snipers were. There were many houses on the slopes to the south, and several tall buildings across the Miljacka, with a clear view of the graveyard.

  Sinisa glanced at his watch. “Forty-five seconds!” he called out.

  “That woman is my wife!” Dragan shouted. “My wife!”

  “Forty seconds.”

  “I make a bad enemy, Sinisa Obradovic. If you do this thing then you too will have taken my wife from me. I make a bad enemy!”

  “Then perhaps I should just kill you now,” Sinisa suggested.

  “Perhaps you should!”

  “Christ,” I muttered. It wasn’t bravado. Dragan really was nuts.

  “If you stay here for only thirty more seconds,” Sinisa said, “I will.”

  I held my breath. I wanted them to stay. I wanted Sinisa to wipe them out. But just before Sinisa’s deadline the Tigers began to retreat downhill, towards their vehicles.

  Sinisa looked back at us, grinning smugly.

  “They’ll be back,” I warned him.

  “I doubt that.”

  “Paul’s right,” Talena said. “Those guys are crazy. And crazy dangerous. You know that, right? If they find out where you are…”

  “If they find out where we are they will be very frustrated. If Dragan Kovacevic tries to leave the country, believe me, I will know.”

  “Leave the country?” I asked, perplexed.

  “I am no longer based in Bosnia,” Sinisa explained. “You will come with me to my new headquarters.”

  “I what? Where? What country? When?” Everything was happening too fast.

  “Albania. Today.”

  “Albania?”

  “No worries, Mr. Wood,” he said. “I think you will like it.”

  * * *

  Sinisa was in a hurry. We didn’t have time to drive Talena to the airport. Instead we dropped her off downtown where she could catch a taxi. I exited the car with
her, and she turned to me, and we hugged each other so hard that after a moment I relaxed my grip for fear I might crack one of her ribs.

  “You take care of yourself,” she whispered. “And Saskia too. You have to take care of both of you. Don’t you dare do anything stupid and get yourself hurt. Don’t you dare. Promise me you’ll come back safe.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t go,” she said. She let me go and shook her head angrily. “This is crazy. What am I doing? I’m not going. No. I’m staying here with you.”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t. I’m wish you could, believe me, but no. You have to go back to work, and you have to be the one to help us if we get in trouble.”

  “I can’t. Fuck the job, Paul, I can’t go, this is wrong. It feels so fucking wrong to turn around and walk out on you. Fuck. Fucking fucking fuck. You better not just be telling me to leave so I’ll be safe.”

  “I’m not. Talena, I don’t want you to go any more than you do. But we’ll be safer if you leave.”

  “How am I supposed to help you if you get in trouble in Albania?” she asked.

  “Call my friends. Hallam and Steve and Lawrence. They’ll come if I’m in trouble.”

  “God damn it. I better hear from you every fucking chance you get. Every single day. No exceptions.”

  “Every chance I get,” I promised.

  “You better. I…” She sighed. “This is so fucked up. We shouldn’t be doing this like this, not here, not now, but…Paul, listen, I know this is all crazy, this whole, everything that’s been happening. And I know we haven’t talked, I can’t even remember the last time we really talked. I know things haven’t been good between us for awhile. But these last few days, I’ve been thinking…maybe, when you get back, maybe we could try one last time. Things will have to be different. Very different. But maybe we could try.”

  “I would like that,” I said quietly. “Very much.”

  “Okay. Good. Okay.” She took a deep breath. “You know, I almost, I almost forgot how much I like you. I forgot how good you are. How did that happen? How did we let that happen?”

  “It was my fault,” I said.