Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  It turned out I didn’t need to be quite so concerned about what the FBI might do to him.

  “So that’s it,” I finished. “That’s the story.”

  “That’s everything,” Agent Turner said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I figured she knew that there were gaps in my story. I expected her to start probing for as many details as possible, begin an exhaustive interrogation.

  Instead she asked, annoyed, “And what do you expect me to do?”

  Talena and I exchanged bewildered glances.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. “I’m telling you that there are wanted war criminals here on American soil.”

  “No. You told me that an illegal immigrant and known criminal told you this. You have not actually personally seen any of the alleged war criminals here in America, correct?”

  “I…well…no, not personally. But Arwin wouldn’t have lied about it. And regardless I’m telling you about an international war criminal smuggling ring.”

  “Mr. Wood, the FBI’s jurisdiction ends at the American border. Since 9/11 we have obviously grown more interested in international crime, but Bosnian war criminals, however terrible their previous deeds may be, are not an obvious threat to our homeland security. The system you helped build for them is a disturbing development, and frankly I think you ought to be ashamed for what you have done, but it’s also nothing new, the genie of strong cryptography has been out of its bottle for years. If you had seen them here in person, that would be something. Then, in consultation with the war crimes tribunal, I could launch an official investigation with an eye towards serving the tribunal’s warrant and arresting these persons. But all you have, Mr. Wood, is a colourful story, all of which took place outside of America, and no supporting evidence. I am a federal agent, not Glinda the Good Witch.”

  “Mycroft. The web site. That’s evidence.”

  “A web site which, if your claim is correct, contains pictures that contain undecryptable messages. Even if your friend cooperates with us and opens his back door, which you admit is unlikely, it is an untrustworthy web site full of uncorroborated information, hosted in Albania, again very far indeed from our jurisdiction, and extremely unlikely to contain actionable evidence. Honestly, Mr. Wood, what did you expect? SWAT teams and all-points bulletins and a slot on the Ten Most Wanted list?”

  “Something like that,” I admitted.

  She shook her head. “On a personal level obviously I deplore what these people have done. But there is nothing I can do in the way of initiating an investigation and pursuing them. Not without real physical evidence that war criminals are on American soil.”

  “Then who else?” Talena asked angrily. “Should we go to the Secret Service or CIA or who? You can’t just blow us off like this. We’ll go to the media if we have to.”

  “With what?” Agent Turner asked. “I do understand your frustration, Miss Radovich, but once again, you have no evidence. Believe me, CNN won’t receive you with any more warmth than I have. I suspect considerably less.”

  Talena shook her head disbelievingly. “This is crazy.”

  “I’ll tell you what I am going to do,” Agent Turner said. “I will file a report on Sinisa and his smuggling network with the CIA. That is of some interest because like all smuggling networks it is a potential threat to national security. In that report I will mention Zoltan Knezevic and his alleged presence in the United States. I have no idea what, if anything, the CIA will do with this information. I suspect very little.”

  “This is so fucked,” I said. “That’s all? That’s all you’re going to do? You’re going to file a report and forget about it?”

  “That’s all I can do for the moment,” Agent Turner said sharply. “Until and unless you can come to me and tell me that you are willing to testify under oath that with your own eyes you have seen one of these war criminals here in America. I would consider either or both of you to be a credible eyewitness. Or you can bring me Arwin and convince me of his credibility. But judging from his history and your depiction of him that will be something of a challenge.”

  “Oh,” I said, beginning to understand. “You want me to arrange a meeting with them. So I can come and tell you I’ve seen them here personally.”

  Agent Turner paused, and said very carefully, “I am not suggesting that. It would be unethical for me to do so. Such an action could expose both of you to considerable danger.”

  “Uh-huh. Suppose I do come to you and tell you I’ve seen them. What happens then?”

  “If that were to happen, then I could begin communications with the war crimes tribunal which should, after several weeks, culminate with the initiation of an official investigation.”

  “After several weeks?” Talena asked, disbelievingly.

  “If we’re lucky. The wheels of international justice grind exceedingly slow. And of course after we serve the warrant the subjects will have various levels of legal appeals before we actually turn them over to the tribunal. If everything goes smoothly it will probably still be years before they make it to The Hague. Hypothetically speaking of course.”

  “That’s insane,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” Agent Turner agreed. “That’s international law.”

  Talena and I stopped for a coffee at Steven’s Café on Market en route to the BART station. We had plenty of time. Expected a lengthy interrogation, both of us had phoned our workplaces and told them we wouldn’t be in until noon.

  “I should have known,” I said. “It was all too perfect. We find an apartment and move in, Saskia gets your old place, Saskia gets a job, I get, well, at least half a job, summer is wonderful, we’ve got money in the bank, Steve and Lawrence are coming to visit, everyone’s happy, life is perfect, and then boom. I should have seen it coming.”

  Talena nodded. She hadn’t spoken a word since leaving Agent Turner’s office.

  “I’ve still got about four thousand dollars of Sinisa’s money in the bank,” I said.

  “Blood money,” she said dully. “They stole it from the Muslims and Croats they murdered. Or from smuggling during the war. We can’t spend it any more. Not on ourselves.”

  “I know.”

  We sipped our coffees, dejected.

  “Sinisa was in the Dutch Army at Srebrenica,” I said. “He was there. Seven thousand people massacred. How could he turn around and help the same people who did it?”

  “Money,” Talena said.

  “Money. Yeah. Market fucking share. To grow his business. To be the Amazon and the EBay of international crime. I should have known. I should have fucking known.”

  “Stop that,” Talena said sharply. “Let’s focus on what we’re going to do. Not what you think you should have done or known or telepathically intuited.”

  “Okay.” I sighed. “I guess I’ll email Arwin and try to set up a meeting. Except I can’t think of any good excuse to want to see them. Maybe I can check out the area boxing gyms. They might be working out at one of them.” It sounded feeble even as I said it.

  “Arwin’s back door,” Talena said. “If he gave you his password. Then maybe you could read the messages and find out where they are.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “If he just up and gave it to me.”

  We looked at each other.

  “They’re going to get away, aren’t they?” Talena asked. “They’ll find out we’re looking for them and they’ll disappear. Just like that. Take a bus to Columbus, somewhere nobody knows them. They’ve got all kinds of money, they’ll help each other out, they could die of old age here. Just like a lot of Nazis did. They’re going to get away.”

  “Not if I can help it,” I said. But it felt like an empty promise.

  * * *

  I went from the FBI to my job at Autarch Software, where I wrote billing-management software for cell phones. It was only twenty hours per week, but it paid forty dollars an hour, a sum I would have sneered at during the dot-com boom but which seemed a godsend in this post-cras
h era. A painful era which at long last seemed to be ending. Most of my qualified techie friends now had jobs, and it took reassuringly longer every week to browse the coder-help-wanted ads on Craigslist, Monster, and HotJobs. I was still worried that in the long term all the world’s programming jobs would be outsourced to Bangalore, but in the medium term, my professional future looked brighter than it had for years.

  I sent Arwin an email from work. I hoped to get him to set up a meeting with Zoltan, and maybe wheedle his back door’s private key from him, using the carrot of a job along with the implied stick of an FBI investigation.

  From: balthazarwood@yahoo.com

  To: raskolnikov@hushmail.com

  Subject: what up?

  Date: 15 Aug 2003 19:11 GMT

  Hey, Arwin, what’s going on?

  Wanna meet for a beer tonight or tomorrow? I’m working a contract job now and I’ve got some leads you might be interested in. Say, Noc Noc, 7:00 tonight, if you’re free?

  Paul

  Arwin called me just before I left work.

  “Hey hey hey, my main man Paul!” he greeted me.

  “Arwin, hey, what’s up? Got time for a beer?”

  “Tomorrow. Tonight I got a date. You should see this girl. She’s like a fucking miracle freak of nature. Her tits, man, they’re beyond good, they’re fucking hypnotic.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” He laughed. “Just kidding. Her name’s Oksana. She acts like she’s a good girl, but she’s a nasty freaky ho, I can tell it, I can smell it. But she’s playing good girl so I’m playing romantic Russian criminal.”

  “You are, technically, a Russian criminal,” I said. “But romantic?”

  “Fuck, man, I don’t know. Chicks see what they want to see.”

  “True.”

  “True dat. What about these jobs?”

  I described the openings that did more or less exist at Autarch Software. “They’re a small startup company,” I warned him. “So this depends on financing. Right now I’m only working twenty hours a week. Ian, my friend who got me the job, he says it’s a slam-dunk, but you know how it is. Not until the ink dries on the paper.”

  “All right. But they sound pretty good. I could do them. You know that.” He sounded like it was important I believe him.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I know that.”

  “They pay cash?”

  “You don’t have to worry about it. You tell them you’re a self-employed sole proprietorship. There’s a massive enforcement loophole there. Then they wash their hands and pay you like you’re a business, and that means it’s your responsibility, not theirs, to check whether you’re legal or not.”

  “Cool. That’s fucking great, man. I got to get a new job. Right now I’m working for this Chink fuck who’s got this online porn site. At first I thought, hey, cool, he pays fuck-all but still the greatest job ever, right? But mother of fucking God, man. This shit he does, it is fucked up. This shoot they were doing yesterday, you shoulda seen it –”

  I definitely did not want to know a single thing about pornography so extreme that even Arwin found it disturbing. “Listen,” I said quickly, “you seen Zoltan or Zorana?”

  “Actually, yeah,” he said. “Zoltan called me like an hour ago. Asking about you and if I had your phone number. He sounded, I dunno, weird. I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk to him, so I told him I just had your email. He didn’t even want that.”

  I sat for a second, trying to make sense out of what I had just heard. Zoltan had called Arwin to ask about me. Why would Zoltan want to get in touch with me?

  “Sounded weird how?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Just like something had gone wrong.”

  For a bad moment I wondered if Zoltan somehow knew I had gone to the FBI. But he couldn’t. No one knew but me, Talena, and Agent Turner herself. It had to be just coincidence that he was asking about me now.

  There had been that conversation in Albania, when Zoltan and Zorana had pumped me for information on living in California, and I had told them they could call me if anything went wrong. That could explain why they were trying to find me. If so, it was perfect. I would meet them, give them advice on whatever their problem was, maybe even find out exactly where they were living, and then I would go to Agent Turner and topple the first domino in a chain that hopefully led from her office all the way to the Hague and the international war crimes tribunal.

  “Do you have his number?” I asked.

  “No. I think he called from a pay phone.”

  “All right,” I said. “If he calls again, give him my cell number, and tell him I’ll be happy to meet him and help him out if he’s having any trouble.”

  “Really? Okay, you want to play nice with those two crazies, that’s your problem. You want to meet for a beer tomorrow? Noc Noc is good, that place rocks. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all about the freaky Oksana.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said, amused. “Sounds good. See you then.”

  Chapter 19

  Spy In The House Of Love

  The number 19 bus took me to the corner of 16th Street and Rhode Island. From there I walked a steep seven blocks to our house. I could have waited for another bus, but after six hours staring at a computer screen while performing intense mental abstractions, any physical strain was refreshing. I didn’t pay attention to my surroundings. My thoughts alternated between work problems and how I might convince Arwin to give up his password.

  Talena had just gotten home, was shrugging off her jacket as I walked in.

  “Hi, honey, I’m home, what’s for dinner?” I mock-demanded. I swung the door shut behind me, walked up to her, and kissed her hello. I did not notice that the door did not thunk into place.

  “I was just wondering that,” she said. “We could make fajitas, or –””

  She stiffened and looked over my shoulder. I released her and turned around, perplexed. Then I gasped with surprise and horror.

  Zoltan and Zorana stood in the doorway.

  “Paul,” Zoltan said, as Zorana closed the door behind them. “So good to see you.”

  “Uh,” I said. Play it cool. “Yeah. Hi. Good to see you too.” I approached his outstretched hand and reached to shake it. “How did you find out –”

  But I never finished asking him how he found where I lived, because he punched me in the stomach so hard that I blacked out for a moment.

  It was a perfect punch, just what he had taught me in Sinisa’s basement boxing gym, a low right cross, powered from the hips, connecting just under my ribcage and exploding into my solar plexus. When I came to I was curled up on the floor, clutching my gut and retching for breath. He had knocked the wind out of me. I hurt so badly my first coherent thought was that he had damaged some organ and I must be bleeding internally. All strength had drained from my limbs. I felt like a marionette whose strings had been cut. I looked up, still gasping ineffectually like a landed fish, still not really understanding what was going on. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Talena lookd down at me, shocked, her mouth open, and her hands fluttered ineffectually in front of her as Zorana, behind her, grabbed Talena’s long dark hair and yanked. Talena’s head flew back and hit the wall with a sickening crack. As she fought for balance Zoltan hit her in the gut with a textbook left hook and Talena folded over gracefully, like it was deliberate, some sort of gymnastics move, and fell near me on the floor. I tried to scramble over on top of her, to shield her body with mine, but I couldn’t breathe, I was too weak to move fast, and before I made it to her Zorana stepped behind me and unleashed a perfect kick into my testicles. The pain was incredible, brain-erasing, a nuclear detonation. It reduced me to an animal. For a moment I stopped thinking about Talena. I no longer knew that Talena was in the room. I no longer knew where or maybe even who I was. All I knew was that I was in unbelievable agony and I couldn’t breathe.

  By the time I finally forced oxygen back into my wheezing, pain-wracked bod
y, my wrists had been handcuffed behind my back and a filthy dishrag had been stuffed into my mouth and tied around my head. From where I lay on the floor I could see that Talena too had been cuffed and gagged. Blood seeped down the side of her head and onto her right ear and the side of her face, and she coughed and choked against her gag. It was almost unbearable, watching her like that, unable to do anything to help her. I still didn’t really comprehend what was going on, it had all happened too suddenly, but when I came to enough of my senses to understand that Talena was badly hurt and in terrible danger, that hurt worse than any physical pain I could possibly suffer.

  Zoltan barked something in Serbian and then he was behind me, lifting me up by the arms. I scrambled to get to my feet before he dislocated both of my shoulders. He marched me over into the kitchen, spun one of the wooden chairs around, and sat me down, threading the back of the chair between my back and my cuffed arms. My shoulders immediately began to ache. Zorana, after closing all the curtains, forced Talena onto a chair next to me. Zoltan shoved her chair next to mine so we sat side by side, our backs to the kitchen table. Then he took another chair and sat in front of us. There wasn’t much room and his knees almost touched mine.

  “From the beginning I wanted to kill you,” he said. “From the beginning.”

  I tried to talk through my gag, to ask him what was going on, to feign indignation, but the noises that came out were incoherent and so quiet I don’t know if he heard anything at all. I was so weak and nauseous with pain that I don’t think he would have understood me even without the gag. My lungs and shoulders ached, my stomach where he had hit me felt like it was on fire, and worst of all a huge, cold, sickening knot of agony had formed deep inside my gut and seemed to tighten with every breath. I breathed as fast and shallowly as I could and told myself not to throw up, whatever happened, or with this gag on I might easily suffocate myself.

  “We were so good to you,” Zorana said. She sounded disappointed, like she was scolding a wayward child. “We helped your little friend Saskia, we paid you well, we fed you, we sheltered you, we drank beer with you. I thought we were friends, Paul. And now you go to the FBI, you try to have us arrested? You betrayed us. There is nothing worse than a person who betrays his friends. Nothing worse.”