Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  “We’re flying,” I said. “You’re flying us to Italy, aren’t you?”

  Sinisa grinned widely. I felt vaguely disappointed, anticlimactic. It was nice that he had fooled Dragan, but I had somehow expected more.

  “I guess that’s good,” I said. As long as we stayed under Italy’s radar we should be fine. I had heard somewhere that despite America’s decades-old War On Drugs, Colombian drug dealers still flew into Florida and Texas in small planes all the time. I expected the Italian radar shield was relatively porous. “Then what? You want to tell me now? Some ship going to America? We live inside a shipping container for a couple of weeks?”

  “It is a possible route,” Sinisa said. “Some of my associates have spent considerable sums customizing shipping containers for such purposes. But no. That is not how you are getting to America.”

  “Then how?”

  “This is a business,” Sinisa said. “Like any other business. Do you know how to grow a business? Increase profits?”

  “What?”

  “There are basically three techniques. Increase margins, increase market share, or move into new markets. If you are moving into new markets, it is best to choose a market with high profit margins. Traditionally the highest profit margins are found in luxury goods, the more exclusive the better. Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, those are the classic examples.”

  “This is all very interesting,” I said, “but I’m not following your point.”

  “When people think of smuggling they think of filthy people sneaking over borders, hidden in back seats and shipping containers, riding underneath trains. It is a business whose clients are desperate, which is good, but poor, which is not. It occurred to me some time ago that I might be able to target an entirely separate market segment. One with a considerably greater profit margin and considerably wealthier clients.”

  I paused. “High-end refugee smuggling.” It sounded like a contradiction in terms.

  “A market bigger than you might think. There is our airplane.”

  It gleamed. I didn’t know much about jets but I knew this was newish and expensive.

  “You own that?” I asked, astonished. I was confident it was an order of magnitude beyond my previous estimate of Sinisa’s wealth.

  “At present I own one thirty-second of it.”

  “What?”

  “Fractional ownership. Very popular among corporations and wealthy individuals. Warren Buffett, the legendary American investor, he owns the company that operates this particular airplane. I purchased a fraction of a jet, one hundred hours of flight time a year. Mr. Buffett keeps a huge fleet around the world, so I can use one whenever and wherever I like. His company provides the pilots, files flight plans, everything. You must forget the big public airlines. Their business models are unsustainable. Fractional ownership is the major profit centre of modern aviation.”

  “You rented a private jet for us?” I was flabbergasted.

  “Misdirection,” Sinisa said, enjoying my reaction. “Nobody expects the people who step out of a ten-million-dollar jet to be missing any documents. Even if they are, it means only that there is a paperwork problem, not that they are filthy illegal immigrants.”

  “You’re flying us to Italy in a private jet.”

  Sinisa said nothing.

  “My God,” I said. “You’re flying us straight to America?”

  “Sadly, no,” Sinisa said. “We would need contacts in America, we would have to land illegally or influence the immigration officers, and we are still not yet there. No, we are flying to a place where influence and legal documentation is very easy to acquire, and where the road to America is wide and clear.”

  “Where? Mexico? Wait a minute. We? You’re coming with us?” I felt dizzy. All my imaginations and expectations of the near future had just been extinguished, replaced with a blank canvas.

  “Mexico is too big, too important,” Sinisa said. “Influence there is very expensive, easily compromised, tangled up with drug cartels. No, we go to a little country. A little country for which I have big plans. I think you will like it. The scuba diving is excellent.” He smiled. “We will stop first in the Canary Islands, to refuel, and then, perhaps sixteen hours from now, we land in Belize.”

  Part 3

  Belize

  Chapter 14

  Borderlands

  The Gulfstream IV jet that carried us away from Albania was furnished with overstuffed leather chairs arranged in sixes around five mahogany tables. Original art hung on the walls. Two Filipina waitresses served us smoked salmon crepes on fine china. The huge plasma television played the Godfather trilogy followed by GoodFellas and Scarface. I kept expecting to wake up. At one point I actually pinched myself.

  The passenger list consisted of myself, Saskia, Sinisa, Arwin, Zoltan, Zorana – and the zombies, seventeen men and seven women, scowling and smoking up a storm. I was a little shocked when the first cigarette was lit. After realizing that smokers would not be keelhauled, I bummed one final Marlboro Light from Arwin. These days there is nothing quite so decadent as smoking at thirty thousand feet.

  I looked at the zombies and wondered why Sinisa was going to so much trouble for them. Way back when, he had quoted fifty thousand dollars as his list price for American emigration. Multiply by twenty-four and you get $1.2 million. The zombies sure didn’t look like they were worth that much. Two of them stood out, their aristocratic leader and the little goateed bantamweight, but the other twenty-two were drab and lifeless. Slack, fleshy faces, tangled and/or thinning hair, cheap shoes, pot bellies, sour frowns, grunts rather than words, fingers and uneven teeth stained chain-smoker yellow, dull eyes, drained expressions, colourless forgettable men and women the eye slid naturally away from – for them Sinisa had rented an intercontinental jet?

  Apparently so. It sure wasn’t for me and Saskia. We were last-minute additions, surplus to requirements, not particularly wanted on the voyage. This journey – the “culmination of a plan of many years,” Sinisa had said – was all about the zombies. I couldn’t imagine why.

  At least one of them proved useful. When we ascended to cruising altitude, Saskia’s left ear refused to equalize to the lowered pressure. She tried to tough it out but within minutes she started to weep from the pain in her unnervingly silent way. Sinisa called on the white-haired zombie leader, who turned out to be a doctor, and injected her with muscle relaxant. I was a little reluctant to let him stick her with a needle, but I couldn’t think of any rational objection, and to my surprise it actually worked.

  The Canary Islands refuelling stop took less than an hour. Sinisa spent the whole time looking out the window, expression taut, drumming his fingers on the mahogany. He smoked six cigarettes in those fifty minutes. I had never seen him nervous before. I understood that if we were going to be interdicted and arrested, it would be here. The zombies were nervous too, quiet and tense. It rubbed off on the rest of us, and when we finally lifted off, the Gulfstream’s belly newly full of jet fuel, Arwin sighed with relief.

  “Next stop,” Sinisa announced, “paradise.”

  “Sinisa,” I said. I couldn’t resist any longer.

  “Yes?”

  I nodded at the zombies. “Who are these guys?”

  Silence fell. Sinisa exchanged a look with Zoltan and Zorana. Arwin leaned forward, interested. It seemed he too didn’t know the whole story. Most of the zombies continued to pay no attention, but the white-haired man turned to look at us, and the goateed Napoleon glared at me as if I should be shot for even asking the question. Those two understood English, I could tell by the way they listened.

  “In Kosovo,” Sinisa said slowly, “after NATO drove the Serbian forces away, the Albanian rebels began to persecute the Serbians in the same way that they themselves, I am sorry to say, had been oppressed.” Zoltan started to say something but Sinisa held up his hand. “I am sorry to say it but it is true,” he said firmly. “Our friends here, they were important personages in Kosovo once. Mayors, militar
y leaders, police chiefs. If they had stayed they would have been murdered. Four years ago I took them in. Today, finally, I take them to a place they are safe.”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart,” I said.

  Sinisa smiled. “That I did not say.”

  It was a plausible story. The life expectancy of a former Serb police chief in Kosovo, after the Serbian yoke had been lifted, was probably measured in minutes. Doubtless there were reasons for that, but I was in no position to pass judgement. There were few angels slumming in the Balkans, and even they had probably lost their halos.

  “So why Belize?” I asked.

  Sinisa pretended not to have heard me. Clearly that was a question too far.

  “Scuba diving,” Zoltan growled, frowning at me. “All of them expert scuba divers.”

  I looked at the squat, dumpy zombies, most of whom I wouldn’t have trusted to tread water.

  “Of course,” I agreed. “Why else?”

  * * *

  We landed at dawn at the airstrip outside Punta Gordo, a small town in the south of Belize, on the coast between Mayan jungle and the luminous blue Caribbean, a town so distant that the only roads to the rest of the world remained unpaved, and at the height of rainy season, unnavigable. From the sky, the thick jungle that began on the western edge of the airstrip and continued uninterrupted all the way to Guatemala looked like another kind of ocean, pervasive, all-encompassing. Belize clearly did not number overpopulation among its problems.

  The landing strip, even to my untrained eye, seemed surprisingly long and well-maintained for a remote jungle airfield. I wondered if it might be used by the military. A van and bus waited for us on the grassy patch between the landing strip proper and the foreboding wall of jungle. The drivers wore airport uniforms. We moved slowly, half-sedated by jet lag and by sixteen hours in an airplane; the brain-deadening effects of dry air, low pressure and cramped conditions are only partially cushioned by imperial luxury. Even at that hour, stepping onto the slightly jittery staircase and into Belize’s damp tropical heat felt like entering a sauna.

  Zorana directed traffic. The zombies and, to my surprise, Arwin, climbed on to the bus; the rest of us got in the van; and we drove off. That was it, no Customs, no Immigration, no security, no nothing. The simplicity was stunning. Just step into a private jet, effectively rented by the hour to anyone with enough money, and fly anywhere you want. All Sinisa had needed to do in order to smuggle thirty people into Belize was was bribe the men who managed a small airport in a poor benighted Third World country. I doubted their price was anything more than a rounding error next to the cost of fractional Gulfstream ownership.

  Our van went only as far as the other side of the airport. Sinisa, Zoltan, Zorana, Saskia and myself were scheduled to fly immediately to Belize City. I didn’t know why, and I was too tiredly jubilant to care. Saskia and I were safe in North America. We had not been attacked, or arrested, or betrayed. We were not home yet, we were a long way from home, but we were at least on the right continent. It was a heck of a start.

  And we were safe from Dragan. After weeks of imagining him around every corner, it was hard to believe that this, but it was true. This single drastic stroke had left the Mostar Tigers so far behind us they effectively no longer existed. They were doggedly persistent, fuelled by a blood vendetta, but they were small-minded men, constitutionally incapable of crossing oceans and spanning continents, entirely without Sinisa’s ability to think big and act globally. I was certain they would follow us no further. As far as Dragan was concerned we might as well have escaped to Mars.

  Our flight to Belize City allowed me to chalk up another entry on my list of Obscure Third World Airlines I Have Flown. In this case, Maya Island Air, with service several times daily from Punta Gordo. Tickets were cheap, twenty-five cash US dollars a pop, and nobody asked for a passport. The other passengers were a bewilderingly diverse human menagerie: elderly Mayan women in traditional dress, a dreadlocked black man in a business suit, a gang of heavily tattooed Latino men, four young Austrian backpackers, three elderly American expats, and a clutch of blond leather-faced Mennonites in suspenders and straw hats who looked like they had just stepped out of the eighteenth century, plus the five of us. I hadn’t even realized that Belize was an English-speaking nation until I heard the other passengers talking.

  The prop plane was small, very loud, and shuddered like the pilot had Parkinson’s. Nonetheless I managed to doze through the one-hour flight. A van-taxi carried all five of us from the Municipal Airport to the Radisson Fort George, Belize’s finest and only four-star hotel. We drove through the ugly sunbaked ghetto that was Belize City, cracked and grimy streets with open sewers carved roughly into either edge, lined with buildings that were either cheap concrete carcasses or ramshackle wood-frame and corrugated-aluminum houses, all worn and dull and faded, any bright colours long since bleached and pounded flat by the relentless tropical sun. Only a few elegant colonial buildings leavened the oppressive shantytown feel.

  The Radisson Fort George was objectively a little shabby, but compared to the city outside it was the Taj Mahal. Sinisa strode to the front desk like he owned the place and said, “Obradovic, a suite and a double room, and quickly please, we are quite tired.”

  The receptionist scurried to make arrangements. When asked for identification, Sinisa, to my surprise, passed over not a Dutch passport but a green and gold one emblazoned BELIZE, along with an American Express Platinum card. Nobody else had to show any ID.

  “I didn’t know you were a citizen,” I said, on the way up.

  “Until last year,” Sinisa said, “anybody with fifty thousand dollars could purchase Belizean citizenship. The Economic Citizenship Program. Last year, because of American pressure, it was cancelled.” He smiled. “Do you know what then happened to the price of a fully valid Belize passport, if you know the right people?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “It plummeted. Adam Smith would be proud. The capitalism of the black market is far more ruthless than any bureaucratic initiative. For thirty-five thousand dollars each I can arrange for both you and she to become citizens of this nation.”

  An interesting idea, but, “I think that’s out of our price range,” I said, as we stepped out of the elevator. “And we’d still need a visa for the States. Is that what you’re doing for all the zombies?”

  “The what?”

  I had forgotten that Arwin’s pet name for them was not universal. “Your friends who got on the bus.”

  “Never mind them,” Sinisa said, and his voice had an edge to it. “You will not see them again. They have nothing to do with you. Forget them. Here is your room, next to ours. Sleep. We are all tired. Sleep and I will see you tonight.”

  After a month on a cheap cot, the bed of a four-star hotel felt like heaven. I disappeared into it like it was a black hole.

  * * *

  I woke to terrifying disorientation. For a long moment I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. I couldn’t have told you what the last thing I remembered was. I had lost all sense of chronological order.

  I looked over, beginning to panic, and when I saw Saskia sleeping peacefully in the other bed, the spark of recognition caused the rest of my memory to assemble. Belize City. Of course. I stood up, padded to our window, and looked out over the Caribbean and the long strips of mangrove-covered cayes that parallelled the shoreline a few miles from the mainland. It was hard to believe that only 24 hours ago I had been in Albania. My new surroundings were so different that my month in Vlore felt like a fleeting and insubstantial dream.

  It was midafternoon. I was wide awake, ready for action, eager to explore. I dug a pair of jeans from the battered Adidas bag that still contained all my worldly possessions, brushed my teeth, and sallied forth, down the stairs, through the empty lobby, and out into Belize City.

  The heat outside was like a physical weight on my shoulders, as bad as the worst of the Balkan heat wave but much more humid. The area
around the hotel was quiet, but a block away the streets buzzed with cars, trucks, businessmen in suits, dreadlocked rasta-men, women carrying plastic shopping bags, blond Mennonites in overalls, schoolchildren in green-and-white uniforms. Belize’s ethnic demography seemed equally split between black and Latino, plus a small native minority and a smattering of whites. An ad on the side of a passing truck advertised “Belize’s Best Buy!” – beans, apparently. I passed a company with the disturbing name of The Pathology Laboratory. Signs adorned with Pepsi or Coke logos headlined almost all storefront windows; those two companies gave Third World proprietors free signs in exchange for the advertising space.

  My usual first-day-in-the-country priorities: money and information. Belize Bank’s ATM rejected my Citibank card, but its tellers happily converted 100 cash euros to 210 Belize dollars, and the window Visa and MasterCard stickers indicated I could get credit-card advances if necessary. I wandered until I found an Internet café, which didn’t take long. Belize City’s population was a meagre 50,000, its downtown very compact. The Net cost only four Belizean dollars an hour. I emailed Talena the grand news that we were safe and sound in an English-speaking nation halfway across the world from the Mostar Tigers, and cc’d Hallam and Lawrence and Steve. I discovered a very pleasant bookstore called the Book Center, and spent thirty more local dollars on Lonely Planet: Belize.

  I walked over to the mortared-stone breakwater that overlooked the Caribbean, sat in the shadow of a tall tree, and began to read, occasionally looking up at the ocean or the enormous frigate birds hovering in the postcard-blue sky. For the first time in six weeks I started to relax a little. Exploring new cities in new countries was one of my favourite pastimes. And here in Belize I didn’t need to rely on anyone else. Nobody was chasing me. I spoke the language. Sinisa was still a worrisome enigma, but he was living up to his end of our agreement, and while I still might need his help to get Saskia into Mexico and thence America, I no longer relied entirely on his patronage for my day-to-day existence.