Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  I hung up, hoping I had impressed the seriousness of the situation on him, hoping that Zoltan and Zorana didn’t already know where he live, that he wouldn’t bring the Ukrainian girl home to find that violently unwelcoming committee waiting for him. Hoping he wasn’t dead already. Only he could open that back door. That put his name well above mine on any People We Must Kill Right Away list.

  “Okay,” I said. “Onwards.”

  Agent Turner lived in a small house in Emeryville, just west of Oakland, not too far from the BART station. We arrived around 9 PM. It was hard to believe that only three hours ago I had walked happily and confidently back into my home and kissed Talena hello. It felt like weeks had passed. The whole world seemed to have gone through some fundamental change in the last few hours, grown darker, more threatening, less comprehensible. It felt a lot like the day the World Trade Center fell.

  “Come in,” Agent Turner said, greeting us at the front door. “Come in. Sit.”

  Her tiny living room really was straight out of the 1950s, down to the old-fashioned furniture and a print of Rockwell’s American Gothic on the wall. We sat on her couch gingerly. Both of us now had headaches.

  “Do you want some tea?” Agent Turner asked.”

  “Something stronger,” Talena said. “Vodka? Orange juice?”

  I nodded my agreement. I half-expected Agent Turner to say that she didn’t drink, but she disappeared into her kitchen and quickly returned with two tall screwdrivers that were half vodka.

  “I hardly know what to say,” Agent Turner said. “I regret very much what happened to you tonight. That’s one thing. And I want you to understand that this is very serious to me. The leak especially. I believe that only someone who works in the Agency could have read my report today. Only someone who is an agent themselves. Or even more senior.”

  “They said they had a big friend in America,” I remembered. “Jesus. You’re saying they’ve got a fucking FBI agent on their side?”

  “Please remember this is still just a hypothesis,” Agent Turner cautioned. “It fits all the available evidence, but I don’t want to rely on it yet. Your lives are at risk here. Very serious risk. But you have done the right thing. If there is one silver lining to what happened to you, it is that if we capture them we now have enough to incarcerate them here in America for a very long time.”

  “It’s an ill wind,” Talena said bitterly. “So what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Agent Turner said.

  That wasn’t what we wanted to hear.

  “I can’t do what I want to do,” she said. “What I want is for both of you to see a doctor tonight, for evidence of what happened to you. I want a crime scene team in your house. But if someone inside the Agency is reporting to Zoltan…to me, that is the most serious and most dangerous thing. If word gets out that you came here –”

  The door to the house swung open, and Talena and I both flinched. But it was not Zoltan or Zorana who walked in, it was the blonde girl whose picture was on Agent Turner’s desk, maybe a few years older now, her hair longer, dressed in jeans with various peace and Om sigils painted on, wearing a similarly decorated backpack over a tie-dye jacket. She stopped in her tracks and stared at us.

  “Uh…hi,” the girl said, confused.

  “Danielle,” Agent Turner said. For the first time since I had met her she looked awkward and unprofessional. “I, I didn’t expect you home so soon. Yes. This is my daughter Danielle. These are…Dani, I’m sorry, there’s a bit of a work emergency, can you leave us alone for a little while?”

  Danielle’s expression grew sour. “Fine,” she said shortly. She kicked off her shoes and disappeared upstairs.

  “Sorry about that,” Agent Turner said. “I, yes, I was saying. There are a lot of things I don’t dare do. I need to think a little while. I want you to know that I am going to make damn certain that no one finds out you called me tonight. There will be no repeat of the leak. You absolutely need not worry about that. But right now I cannot give you any formal protection. What I need you to do is go about your lives normally. Cautiously but normally.”

  “You have to be kidding,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. Paul, Talena, I am very sorry. But anything I do officially could and would be compromised by Zoltan’s source inside the Agency. This kind of investigation has to be slow and careful. I’ve never done this before. I promise you I will devote every waking hour to it, but at the same time, I have to move slow. I don’t even know where to begin yet. I can’t imagine how Zoltan compromised a federal agent. He –”

  “Bosnia,” Talena said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The mole. Bosnia. And not Zoltan. Sinisa.”

  Agent Turner and I looked at her curiously.

  “The US has had peacekeepers in Bosnia for eight years now,” Talena said. “I bet the mole was there as a peacekeeper. I bet he met Sinisa then. Not Zoltan, he’s just an animal. Sinisa fooled Paul, and Paul’s a lot smarter than your average bear. Sinisa plans long term. I bet the mole and Sinisa met and teamed up back then. I bet he came back from his tour and right away applied for the FBI.”

  Agent Turner and I nodded.

  “A compelling theory,” Agent Turner said, “It will be at the top of my list. But you need to understand, this will still be a slow process. Unless…”

  “Unless what?” I asked.

  “Unless you can get your friend Arwin to open his back door. I may have been wrong about its importance. If we’re right, if there is a…I’ll say it, a mole…he or she may be communicating with Sinisa and Zoltan using the Mycroft site you built. That may be a way to find them.” She sighed. “I hope so. I can’t think of many other ways.”

  * * *

  “Saskia,” Talena said, on the BART ride back from Agent Turner’s. “They’ve got her address. My old address. We need to get her out of there.”

  “Shit. Yeah.”

  We sat in silence for a moment as the train passed beneath the bay.

  “We’re in deep shit,” I said.

  “No kidding. If they find out Agent Turner is looking for the mole…”

  “Yeah. I thought she’d put us under police protection or something.”

  “Then the mole would know. We’re on our own,” Talena said.

  I put my arm around her and we held each other tightly.

  Two stops later, I said, “I’m calling Steve and Lawrence. We might need backup. Maybe they can get over here for a while. I’d feel a lot better with them around.”

  * * *

  “Paul, Talena, hello,” Saskia said, surprised. “Come in, please.”

  We entered Saskia’s apartment, Talena’s old apartment. I felt instinctive foreboding as I crossed the threshold. This was the place where I had spent my year of miserable poverty, and I associated it with frustration and self-loathing. But Saskia had repainted it with swirls of bright green and purple, the apartment’s distinctive sour smell was gone, and the kitchen table was decorated with freshly picked flowers. Food Not Bombs pamphlets, stickers, and buttons were stacked on the counter.

  Saskia was so busy we had hardly seen her in the last month. She worked six days a week, cleaning houses for cash, and spent the rest of her time volunteering with Food Not Bombs and other activist groups. I admired her for it, was glad she was making friends and building a new life, but I was a little worried about her predilection for San Francisco’s loudest and most uncompromising activists. I feared she might start attending demonstrations and get arrested at one that turned violent.

  “Is something wrong?” Saskia asked, after we sat down.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. Something is very wrong.”

  “I believed it was over,” Saskia said, when we finished telling her. “I believed Bosnia was behind me. I believed America was a place to forget.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t have told her, left her in the bliss of ignorance. But she was in danger too, she wa
s a witness, she deserved to know what was happening.

  “What can I do to help?” she asked.

  I paused. I hadn’t expected that. “Nothing, I don’t think,” I said.

  “No. Paul, Talena, that is not good enough. It is because of me you were attacked. If not for me, you would never have become involved. You must allow me to help. You have done so much for me. It is time for me to help you.”

  “There is one thing we would like you to do,” Talena said. “Move out of this apartment. Zoltan and Zorana have this address. I think Paul and I make for pretty good evidence that you don’t want to still be here if they come to check the place out.”

  “You think they will come here?” Saskia asked.

  “It’s possible,” I said. “Not likely, but possible.”

  She thought about it for maybe thirty seconds. Then she said, “No. No, never again. Let them come. Let them come to me. I will wait for them.”

  I stared at Saskia like she had spoken in incomprehensible Croatian.

  Talena recovered first. “Remind me again exactly how them killing you will help us?”

  “It is not only I who is in danger if they come,” she said defiantly. “I have killed Serbs before.”

  Talena said something in Croatian. Saskia said something back. I sighed. My headache had returned and I wasn’t in any mood to argue. I almost missed the wounded and pliable Saskia we had first met.

  “Saskia,” I said, trying to work with her as best I could, “I know you’re a veteran. I know you’re dangerous. But, how should I put this, you’re dangerous like a vicious little terrier, and Zoltan and Zorana are dangerous like big fucking wolves. Terriers who want to live run away from wolves.”

  My offbeat analogy prompted a weird look from Talena. I gave her a shrug intended as ‘best I could do on the spur of the moment with a bad headache’.

  Apparently it hadn’t been good enough. “No more running away,” Saskia declared. “No more being a victim. I was a victim long enough. This is my home now, I will stay, and no one will drive me away.”

  I considered pointing out that we still paid most of her rent, but it seemed like an unfair tactic. God knew she worked harder than I did, scrubbing and mopping and breathing air thick with cleaning fluids for fifty dollars a day, while I groused about making only forty dollars an hour for Autarch in exchange for sitting in front of a computer and writing programs that would probably never improve anybody’s life in any measurable way.

  “That’s just great,” Talena said. “So you’re going to help us by stubbornly refusing to do the one thing we ask you, is that it? Thank you so much.”

  “Ask me to fight. I will fight. Do not ask me to run away. I will never run away again.”

  “Stop being such an idiot. You go to a safe place as of tomorrow,” Talena said.

  “I do not think you have been listening to me. I will do no such thing. I have hidden from these Serbs enough for one lifetime. Do you not remember what they did to us? Three years of snipers and mortars and eating charity food, winter months with no electricity, just enough fuel to live without quite freezing to death, living in our own filth because water was too cold and precious for bathing, watching my friends die in the streets, watching men who had been professors and lawyers beg in the streets for a single egg to feed their family. And we were the lucky people. In the country they were killing whole villages, murdering children in front of their parents, capturing women and raping them for months until they died of it. Do you not remember? I remember you stopped running, Talena. I remember you started walking slowly across sniper streets, you dared them to shoot you. And now you ask me to run from Serbs again? No. Never again. I am glad they have come. I welcome them.”

  I was deeply uncomfortable with her depiction of all Serbs as inhuman killing machines, but decided it wasn’t the right time for a lecture on the evils of cultural stereotypes. One battle at a time.

  “Face it,” I said to Talena. “If she doesn’t want to go, we can’t very well kick her out.”

  “She is being so, fucking, pigheaded!” Talena said, to me but intended for Saskia.

  “Yeah, well, it runs in the family,” I muttered before I could stop myself. Talena looked at me darkly. I hurried on, “If she wants to risk her life for no good reason, and endanger our lives in the process, if she wants to be that selfish, that’s her right.”

  “Thank you, Paul,” Saskia said, satisfied. So much for my guilt-trip tactic.

  “We can’t protect you here,” Talena said. “Nobody can protect you.”

  “I do not want your protection. I want to protect you.”

  I sat up, wincing as the sudden movement intensified my headache. “Wait a minute. You’re thinking about going after them, aren’t you? I bet you’re almost glad they’re here. Now you can make up for that huge unpayable debt that only you think you owe us. Is that it? Am I right?”

  Saskia did not answer.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Talena said, disgusted.

  “I will do what I feel I need to do,” Saskia said.

  I sighed. But I couldn’t really blame her for being so intransigent. There comes a point when you can’t stand the thought of running away any more. I suspected in a comparable situation I might have acted much the same way myself.

  “All right,” I said to her. “Here’s the deal. If we start going randomly off on our own then we’re all screwed. Anything we do about this, the three of us, we tell each other in advance, and we do it together. You stay involved right to the end. But, in the meantime, you move out of the apartment a while, just as a precaution. Deal?”

  Saskia looked at me for a long moment.

  “All right,” she said. “Thank you, Paul. Yes. I agree.”

  * * *

  From: balthazarwood@yahoo.com

  To: raskolnikov@hushmail.com

  Subject: Re: what up?

  Date: 16 Aug 2003 18:11 GMT

  There’s things I need to tell you. There’s things you need to tell me. Pick a time and place. Be paranoid. A public place.

  From: raskolnikov@hushmail.com

  To: balthazarwood@yahoo.com

  Subject: Re: what up?

  Date: 16 Aug 2003 18:33 GMT

  i don’t need you to tell me to be paranoid, paul. i really fucking don’t.

  last night Zoltan calls and says he needs to meet me. cuz the fbi is after me and you told them all about me and shit. glad I checked my messages first. never mind the fbi. he’s the fucking scary one. what the fuck is happening?

  you should go for a romantic sunset walk on the beach tonight. start at judah and go south. and you fucking well better be alone.

  The beach which demarcates San Francisco’s Pacific coast is one of the city’s favourite playgrounds, but near sunset it is almost deserted. I passed only a few dozen people during my twenty-minute walk. A few joggers, some Asian and Mexican fishermen patiently waiting near poles that jutted out of hastily erected pillars of sand, a pair of hardcore surfers in wet suits emerging from the waves, couples walking dogs, a few solitary men and women sitting in the sand and staring wistfully at the sun as it set behind the mighty Pacific. I wondered what they were thinking about. Maybe they were meditating. This was, after all, northern California, and the beach was probably a good place for meditation. Roaring ocean, soft sand, whistling salt wind, whirling flocks of seabirds stained red by the sunset, it was like a New Age postcard. Maybe I should take up meditation myself. I could use some inner peace.

  “Wazzup?” Arwin demanded. I jumped. He had snuck up behind me.

  “Hey,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “You’re doing pretty shitty.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was afraid of that. But Zoltan lied about the FBI, right?”

  “No. It’s true. I went to them.”

  Arwin stopped dead in his tracks. “You what?”

  “I talked to the FBI. And I told them all about you.”


  “What? What did you do that for?”

  “Because Zoltan’s a fucking war criminal,” I said.

  He looked bewildered. “So?”

  “So? You knew?”

  “What, that he did fucked-up shit? I didn’t know know, but man, you look at him and you’re not too surprised, right? What did you expect? You thought he was a Boy Scout? You find out he isn’t and you’re all surprised and you go to the cops? And you tell them about me? What the fucking fuck?” He pushed me, two-handed, hard enough that I had to take a step back to maintain my balance. “You ratted me out? I don’t believe this! Why are we even talking? You find out Zoltan’s got a history and you go crazy? You fucking fuck! They’re going to find me. They’ve got my fingerprints already, you know, I got a record here. You ratted me out just cause you found out Zoltan did some bad shit during the war? It was a fucking war! News flash, bad shit happens during wars!”

  “Bad shit?” I said. “Try putting thousands of people in concentration camps and then torturing men and gang-raping women until they bled to death. Try helping murder seven thousand unarmed men. I’m not exaggerating. You can look it up.”

  Arwin didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, why would you want to, right?” I injected as much sarcasm and contempt into my voice as I could. “Why should you care? Industrial rape and murder and people tortured to death in concentration camps or being lined up and shot in the back of the head by the thousand, that’s just bad shit happening to someone else, why should you give a flying fuck, right?”

  “Concentration camps,” Arwin repeated. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked at me for a moment. Then he started walking again. I stayed next to him.