Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  “Yeah. But, um, Friday’s no-sex stance, that still stands for awhile for me.” I was healing, but still sore and sensitive, and I had an amazing dark fist-sized bruise where Zoltan had hit me. So did Talena, but mine, as I had pointed out proudly to her in the shower, was bigger. Laughter still hurt; sex would probably be agonizing.

  “Me too. I mean,” she waved her hands dismissively, “I don’t want you worrying about me, honestly, just because with me it’s mostly psychological doesn’t mean it’s more serious than you getting your balls kicked in, but the whole ‘psycho madman ripping your clothes off and threatening to rape you and running his knife all over you before cutting your chest open’ thing, I think it might take another couple weeks before I’m real sexually comfortable again.”

  “Psycho madman?” I asked. “You think he’s crazy?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “I guess not. Evil isn’t crazy. Different things.”

  “Yeah.” I glanced at the rest of the paper and decided I wasn’t interested. “You know what? Let’s go get a drink.”

  “A – Paul, it’s not even noon yet.”

  “Well, whenever Noc Noc opens. Arwin liked that place. I owe him…I don’t know. A wake. Fuck being safe and responsible. Let’s go get Saskia and get a drink.”

  I expected Talena to object further, but, “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. Let’s blow off some steam. In case they come kill us tonight, we might as well pickle ourselves first.”

  * * *

  Monday through Thursday of that week passed uneventfully. The constant unease, the unending stress, the not knowing what Agent Turner was doing or what Zoltan and Zorana planned, was a physical weight like wearing a lead coat all day long. Both Talena and I threw ourselves into work. I worked forty-eight hours those four days, even though I was only allowed to bill Autarch twenty hours for the whole week. Each night we held each other tightly until we fell asleep in one another’s arms. Even so our sleep was fitful and restless. Talena twitched and murmured desperate words of Croatian, and I often woke from nightmares in which I was back in Albania, working next to Arwin, and he seemed alive and fine, except he had been scalped and endless rivers of blood flowed down his face.

  And then, Thursday night, as we watched TV on the couch, Arwin emailed me.

  “What the hell?” I said, astonished, staring bug-eyed at my laptop.

  “What?” Talena asked, worried.

  “It’s Arwin. I just got email from Arwin!”

  “You what? From Arwin?”

  “Pretty good trick seeing as how he’s been very dead for the last five days. Get this! The subject line is Dead Man Talking!” I clicked excitedly. Had he somehow faked his own death? Had that been someone else’s body? Was Arwin alive?

  From: raskolnikov@hushmail.com

  To: balthazarwood@yahoo.com

  Subject: dead man talking

  Date: 22 Aug 2003 05:00 GMT

  so if you’re reading this, either i’m dead or i fucked up my dead man’s switch, and if it’s a fuckup then i’ll probably be dead soon anyway, so goodbye.

  this is supposed to be triggered by an obituary with my name and birthdate appearing in my hometown paper. i got a cron job running twice a week checking its web page and if it gets a hit it sends two emails. pretty sneaky, huh?

  the first email goes to the nypd and talks about some mafia guys i know in brighton beach. watch the news closely. you’ll probably hear about it.

  the second email goes to you. you remember our little walk on the beach? hell, i don’t know, could be sixty years ago. sure hope so. anyway we went for a walk on the beach and i came back and looked up our mutual friend Zoltan. the shit he did is so fucked up. in case it wasn’t so long ago, and i stepped in front of a bus or a flamethrower or something, do me a favour and get the fucker.

  it’s a dostoyevsky quote. and ain’t it the truth?

  “i tell you that to think too much is a disease, a real actual disease.”

  take care of yo’self, you ratfuck sonofabitch.

  —arwin

  “God damn,” I said, bitterly disappointed, and pleased, and impressed.

  “Is he alive?” Talena scrambled over to look over my shoulder.

  “No,” I said. “No. But he gave us the key.”

  “The key to his back door? How? Oh,” she said, reading.

  “The very same,” I said. Without stopping to think I called up a new browser window and pointed it to Mycroft. “Let’s you and me open it up and break on through.”

  It wasn’t hard. After all I had built the web site myself. I directed Internet Explorer to Mycroft’s IP number, the unique Internet address I knew by heart, and the login web page I had built myself filled the screen. A couple of logins I had installed for test purposes were probably still there, but there was no point in logging in. I just added “/upload/” after the IP number in Explorer’s address bar, and seconds later, a list of every stegosaurized picture that anyone had uploaded to the system filled the screen. I hadn’t bothered securing this list. The whole point of public-key cryptography is that you don’t care if your encrypted messages are available to the whole world, because only the recipient can read them.

  But in this case, the secret message contained in each picture had been encrypted three times. Once for the intended recipient; once for Sinisa; and once for anyone who knew the pass phrase Arwin had just sent me from beyond the grave.

  There were a lot of messages. Collectively they told a fascinating story. Talena had been right, they were smuggling drugs. But there was so much more to it than that.

  Six months ago, Sinisa Obradovic had been just what he seemed, an effective but small-time smuggler who moved people into and out of the Balkans. But that wasn’t enough for him. Sinisa had ambition. Sinisa had a dream. And Sinisa had a golden opportunity hammering away on his mansion’s wrought-iron gates: the zombies.

  At first Sinisa’s zombie zoo was a simple exchange of services. They paid him with blood money for security and anonymity. But Sinisa slowly began to realize that the increasingly bored and listless zombies could be more than just dependents. That was his real genius. Anyone else would have looked at this vilest group of criminals Europe had seen since the Nuremberg trials, considered their horrific histories and outstanding arrest warrants, and seen a massive liability. Sinisa saw one of the most extraordinary economic assets on the planet. He saw a group of people capable of any kind of crime or violence, fiercely loyal to one another, sitting on a pile of ill-gotten money, and desperate to avoid capture.

  Sinisa struck a deal with them. He would get them out of the Balkans and into relative safety. They would scatter in twos and threes, each little group getting their own little Third World sub-empire, and oversee his smuggling operations for him. They were perfect for the job. A smart, competent, ruthless, tight-knit group who would never dare betray Sinisa for fear of the warrants hanging over their collective heads.

  Saskia’s dream was, just as he had said, to become the Amazon and EBay of human trafficking, to build a people-smuggling empire on which the sun would never set. He had connections. He had the zombies. And soon enough he had Mycroft, perfect secure communications, miles better than passing slips of paper with cell phone numbers on them back and forth in shady bars in Tijuana or Guangzhou or Istanbul.

  It was fascinating, reading the messages in sequence, watching Zoltan’s Latin American business grow, like time-lapse photography of a blooming flower. Further tendrils of empire were already growing around the globe. One of the reasons Sinisa had chosen Belize was its surprisingly good connections to the Orient; many Taiwanese and wealthy Chinese had purchased Belizean passports. The two visitors from Taiwan whose presence I had wondered about, Mr Chang and Mr Lee? Major snakeheads, smugglers who shipped literal boatloads of Chinese from Fujian province into America every month. Mr Chang and Mr Lee were very interested in the new route, and new communications network, that Sinisa had opened up. A pilot joint venture was due to begin n
ext month.

  There were messages from Africans in Angola and the Congo and Liberia and the Sudan, discussing how they might move people across the Sahara and into Europe. There was talk of sending Indonesians into Australia. There were discussions of how many Moldovan women the American sex trade could handle. And his Balkans business continued to thrive, taking people from Central Asia, India, the Middle East, and bringing them to Western Europe.

  Sinisa, like the CEO he was, stayed laser-focused on his one business, people smuggling. Time and again people suggested he used his network to transport drugs, or weapons, or blood diamonds, and time and again he shot them down. Those businesses were too dangerous, too violent, too politically volatile. He did not want to find himself in the crosshairs of America’s longstanding War On Drugs or more recent War On Terrorism. That was too risky. But people smuggling was sufficiently morally ambiguous that it remained a much lower enforcement priority for Western governments. Its slightly lower profits were worth the considerably lower risk.

  But he had made one exception to that rule. Like any other startup, he had cash flow problems.You can’t build a business without capital, but neither banks nor venture capitalists offer money to smuggling syndicates. So he had reached out to his connections in Afghanistan, from which many of the clients of his Balkans business had come, and he had gotten his paws on a mountain of pure Afghani heroin with a street value approaching forty million dollars. His policy was to stay far away from drugs, but just this once, this was different. This was startup capital for a billion-dollar enterprise. “Billion”, with a “b”, as in one thousand million; that staggering sum was his long-term goal. Sinisa wanted to be the CEO of an organization with gross revenues of one billion dollars a year.

  I wondered if CEO was really the right term. Sinisa had the CEO mindset, he thought of himself as a CEO, but chief executive officers have boards, and shareholders, and they operate inside the law, carefully regulated. Sinisa worked in the last shadowy corner of this world where the feudal system reigns, knights and dukes and kings and emperors of crime. Smuggling refugees across the Balkans had made him a duke, but that wasn’t enough. On the other hand he didn’t want to be an emperor; he knew that was too much, would make him a target, like Pablo Escobar.

  The analogy got better the more I thought about it. The zombies were his Knights of the Round Table. Zoltan and Zorana were his co-Lancelots. Arwin and I had been the wizards. And Sinisa, of course, was the king.

  You should have meddled not in the affairs of wizards, King Sinisa, I advised him mentally. For as you can see, we can haunt your ass even after we are dead.

  There were only a few messages that referred specifically to me.

  From: Y To: S

  Subject: READ ME IMMEDIATELY

  Critically important. The attached report was filed on the FBI infobase today. Balthazar Wood has reported that you are smuggling war criminals into the USA and that ZK is at large in America. This is a massive security breach and we need to deal with it immediately.

  From: S To: ZZ

  I have sad and disappointing news. Our ex-friend Paul Wood has found out who you are, and has talked to the FBI.

  Not as bad as it sounds. The FBI cannot start pursuing you yet, but if he tells them that he saw you personally, they will begin an investigation. Of course if they do we will know about it immediately.

  But that will not happen. Because you will go to Paul – who lives at 1256 Rhode Island Street, in San Francisco – and you will make it very clear to him that he will never talk to anyone about this again. You will _not_ cause any permanent damage to him or anyone else.

  The timing is terrible, but remember, we only need his mouth shut for the next few weeks.

  From: S To: Y

  Thank you for the warning. Regardless of what happens you are _not_ to risk discovery in any way. You are more valuable than ZZ and the money combined.

  Obviously we will need to find new programmers for Mycroft 2.0. A shame. Finding trustworthy people is difficult and may delay the project.

  I cannot tell you how much I look forward to seeing you again.

  From: ZZ To: S

  Paul will never speak of us.

  We have made arrangements for the sale and the flight. The agreed price is 13 million dollars. The exchange will take place at an event called Burning Man. The pilot will charge 250,000 dollars. Y reports the pilot is wanted by the FBI and desperate to get into Mexico. Tijuana arrival is scheduled for approximately 0300 on Sunday 31st August.

  “So S is Sinisa,” Talena said, near midnight, when we had finally exhausted the mysteries of Mycroft. “And ZZ is Zoltan and Zorana.”

  “It’s probably Zorana who writes them,” I said. “Her English was always better.”

  “And Y is the mole.”

  I nodded. Sinisa’s source in the FBI, the fourth and most rabid head of Cerberus, the crown jewel of his kingdom.

  “I guess ZZ are just visiting after all,” I said.

  The last message implied that Zoltan and Zorana had not come to America to live, but only because Sinisa’s criminal startup needed funds. They had brought a staggering amount of pure Afghani heroin into America, they had found a buyer, and they were going to sell it, fly the money back to Mexico, and then courier it back to Sinisa in Belize.

  I had heard of Burning Man. Some kind of counterculture arts festival in the Nevada desert held every year, in the week before Labor Day. Lots of drugs and naked people, a huge crowd of suspicious characters and distracting sights, with basically zero police presence, in the middle of the empty desert. Anything could happen at Burning Man, from the stories I’d heard, and in the chaos and confusion and drug-maddened haze, nobody would pay attention. Public enough that murder and betrayal would be difficult, but far from the reach of law enforcement. The perfect place to trade a lot of drugs for a lot of money and then fly that money south to Mexico.

  “They’ll be leaving the country in ten days,” Talena said. “And maybe not coming back.”

  “None of this really helps, does it?” I asked. I wanted to hit something, spend an hour beating up on punching bags, but I knew that even if I did, I would find this hard reality no less infuriating. “We know exactly what they’re doing and we can’t do a thing about it. We have to sit back and do nothing, because Agent Turner has to be all slow and quiet to find whoever the fuck Y is, and I don’t think all this shit we just read is really going to help her that much. If she tries to do anything to stop them, they’ll find out. She’s not going to find Y in the next ten days. They’re going to get thirteen million dollars for Sinisa and his zombie buddies, and then they’re going to get away, and we can’t do fuck-all.”

  * * *

  I woke unusually early the next morning, just past dawn. I tried to fall back asleep but couldn’t. Eventually I surrendered to wakefulness and padded to the shower. When I came out, a damp towel wrapped around my waist, Talena was up.

  “I’m tired,” she said, “but I can’t sleep.”

  “Me too. Doesn’t it suck.”

  I dressed and prepared coffee and bagels as she showered. I wanted to read the paper, but we hadn’t arranged for delivery yet, it was a six-block walk to the nearest newspaper box, and I wasn’t ready to face the world outside.

  Talena pulled on underwear and a Ramones T-shirt and sat at the kitchen table with me. The same kitchen table she had bled on, when Zoltan and Zorana had attacked us.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “Does this place feel like home to you?”

  “It might have someday if it wasn’t for them,” I said.

  “Yeah. For me too.”

  We looked at each other.

  “Does anyplace feel like home?” she asked.

  I said, “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “Huh.” She sipped her coffee. After a moment she said, “That’s not a real reassuring answer.”

  “Not reassuring how?” I asked cautiously.

  “For, like, the fut
ure. You know. Our future.”

  I decided it was wisest to wait for her to explain.

  “I didn’t sleep much,” Talena said. “Tossing and turning and thinking. If we don’t do anything, then what do we do? You know? Get married and have kids?” I twitched. “Relax, Paul, I’m speculating, not proposing. You don’t feel like you belong anywhere. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. So what the hell do we do? Try and settle down and have a normal life and forget that we didn’t do anything?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean, didn’t do anything? We’ve done lots –”

  “I mean, about them.”

  “About them? I…I thought we agreed we can’t do anything.”

  “No. Agent Turner can’t do anything. We could do something. We could go to Burning Man ourselves, try to find them, try to fuck up their plan.”

  I looked at her for a long time.

  “You’re serious,” I said.

  “Like a bullet. Like a heart attack. Yeah, I’m serious. Paul, these people, not just Zoltan and Zorana, them too, but the people the money will go to – besides what they did to us, these are the people who destroyed, slaughtered…ravaged…my city, my country, my family, my friends, my home. Honestly, this may sound crazy, but honestly, I was thinking about it, and if we died and they all died, I swear to God, I would call that a fair trade.”

  “Talena,” I said. “Please. Do not get all martyrish. I’m very sorry, but I am not going to let you die on me.”