by Tom Crown
She felt her stomach tighten. Somehow that van was more intimidating than the barn itself. She focused on the driver and thought she could see Roman behind the wheel. She began taking pictures and kept on as he slowed down and parked. Alex strode to the van and opened the back doors. Often they would open the tractor doors on the side of the barn and drive straight in, loading and unloading the girls inside, but apparently they weren’t too worried today, despite the loss of half their crew. Or perhaps circumstances had forced them to follow new routines.
Roman jumped out, dragging two girls toward the barn. Katia recognized Anna immediately, but she wasn’t sure about the other girl.
She kept scanning the building and saw three more girls through an upstairs window. There were huddling together, watching the returning girls. From that distance, she could just make out their faces from the passports.
She kept firing away with the camera. Going closer, close enough to photograph what it was like inside the structure, would be too dangerous. She hoped the pictures she was taking would be enough for what she wanted to do. Her plan wasn’t clear in every last detail, but she knew she wanted to set these other girls free. Going home, for some, would simply be too shameful, but still they couldn’t stay here.
Perhaps what she really wanted was to see where they would go, given the chance. She wanted to see if they could find a place, and a way to put all this behind them. She needed to see how such a thing could be done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“YOU WANT THEM dead?” Roman asked.
“Not all of them,” Alex replied, looking out the window at the forest across the fields. “But we can’t handle them all. And some are troublemakers.”
“Like Katia.”
Alex shrugged slightly. “She calmed down after the winter. But yeah.”
“So? Which ones?”
Alex sat down in his favorite armchair and looked up at the ceiling, fully done in aging spruce like just about everything else around him. It was ironic that his enterprising spirit had brought him here to a remote farmhouse in the outer perimeter of nowhere. He’d been born in a place just like this, east of Moscow, and he had wanted to leave it since he first grasped the concepts of place, space, and getting the hell out.
Sometimes he questioned what he’d actually accomplished. Two years ago he’d still been in Berlin, not his favorite place in the world, but a place with energy, a place that could be a stepping stone to about anywhere you could dream of. And now here he was, two summers later, on the edge of the inhabited world, indeed barely in it at all.
London was the city he liked best so far, and if he could pick and choose, he’d be running a club in the heart of SoHo, a short cab ride from the immaculate townhouses of Knightsbridge, where he could so easily picture himself having a home. From there he’d take his women shopping, strolling up and down Bond Street, looking for art or jewelry, or navigating the endless labyrinths of Harrod’s. He liked luxury as much as anybody, but he was certain he did so for better reasons than most other. He wasn’t just a peasant boy wanting to show off, but a man who truly admired the delicate craft and the impeccable materials and found comfort and hope in the perfection they reflected. It was mankind at its very best, forming the world with the uttermost determination and precision. It always made him proud to be human and thankful to be alive.
It pained him to admit how far he was from all of that now, how far he was from realizing any of his dreams. All he had to focus on now was cutting his losses and burying them deep beneath the surface of the earth.
He looked at Roman. “Anna and Yelana. Take them. They won’t live long anyway, and they’re by far the most likely to cause trouble.”
There was always money in a girl, no matter how far she’d come, and he hated to let them go, but he knew from experience that he wouldn’t be able to handle them all. The ones with nothing to lose, the ones who might make a break for it when they got to more populated areas, would simply have to stay behind.
“Do it tonight when they sleep,” he said. “Then we’ll bury them in the same hole. We’ll tell the others we’ve sent them south. Which will be true, in a manner of speaking.”
Roman shifted his weight to look at his feet.
“What?”
“I’ve already filled it.”
“So dig it up again. The earth will still be loose.”
“What if I hit the bodies?”
“What if?”
Roman shrugged, but he looked decidedly apprehensive, and Alex knew he had spoken too fast. Roman still needed to feel he was part of a crew, and remembering and honoring Sergei and Dimitri was integral to that delusion.
Alex played with the idea of shooting Roman at the bottom of the hole and then shoveling the earth over him, but that would be premature. He had been working with a crew of three, plus a few locals, and now he was down to just one.
“Let’s go,” he said and got up. “They still have two more hours of work to do.”
“We’re really going to do it?”
“We’re not making any money here anymore. In fact, we’re losing money. And, more important, we have Steve Manning out there in the forest somewhere, and that other guy, Ryan West, and Katia on the loose, maybe going to the police, who knows. And if we survive this, we have people back home holding us both accountable.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh. Exactly.”
“But Katia wouldn’t go to the police.”
“Yeah, well, she might end up there anyway. The point is, the clock is ticking. In fact, time’s already run out. We need to get the hell out of here as fast as we can.”
“Right now? We could just torch the barn.”
Alex shook his head. “I want that money, and a couple of the girls are still worth a lot. When our day of reckoning comes, wastefulness shouldn’t be on the list of our sins.”
“No. You’re right, of course.”
“So bring Anna and Yelana here.”
“Right away.”
“Another thing. You know where that girl lives?”
“Girl?”
“Jenny.”
Roman nodded energetically, apparently liking where this was going.
“Let’s pay her another visit tomorrow. She lives alone, right?”
“Now she does.”
Alex chuckled. “Of course.”
* * * *
Katia pushed herself up from the ground and backed farther away from the barn. The underbrush was dense and slowed her down, but thankfully it was mostly fern and blueberry shrubs, soft and sound-absorbing. She stayed low and continued steadily moving deeper into the forest, well familiar with the slow rising and falling of the moss-covered ground, and the large boulders scattered here and there by the inland ice thousands of years ago. She knew where she was and the distance between herself and the barn, and she knew it wasn’t yet safe to stop.
She had imagined a similar situation so many times, running through the forest, away from the barn, ducking left and right, perhaps hiding behind a boulder or under a low-hanging pine. She didn’t do any of that now. She wasn’t running. She wasn’t escaping. She was already free.
Over the next rise there would be a small creek. The last time she had stepped in that water, she had been stepping right through the paper-thin ice, and her feet had gotten unbearably cold. She had welcomed the pain at the time, considering it appropriate punishment.
She climbed the rise until she saw the creek, right where she had remembered it. She wouldn’t go over it this time, but instead would continue along its banks, moving to her left.
She kept going until she reached a small clearing and immediately focused on a tree on the other side. A section of its bark has been scratched clear, and at its foot wild vegetation had taken root in overturned earth. She stepped up to the tree and touched the scratching, tracing it with her fingertips, the cross, the heart, and the name, Mina. Then she moved back and raised the camera, but lowered it again. It didn’t fe
el right to take this picture. It wouldn’t be right for Mina to be used again.
Katia touched her lips with her fingertips and then touched the tree and the earth. She closed her eyes and felt the ground under her fingertips. She imagined the body below, naked against the earth, the skin pale and bruised. But her skin probably didn’t even exist anymore. Katia wasn’t sure if a body was a feast for everything that lived underground, or a foreign object, strong and resilient. But it didn’t matter. Too much time had passed. Mina was returning to the Earth, giving life in the most primitive of ways. Mina could have done so much more, and she should have been able to. Now she was just a body, lost materials to be used by worms in the dirt, disgusting creatures, unaware and uninterested in the person she had once been. She should have been able to do more than just give her body to this hostile world.
Katia realized tears were trickling down her cheeks and wiped them with the back of her hand, smearing her war paint across her cheeks. She looked around, wanting to make sure she was still alone. Then she gazed at the ground again and vowed she would be back. She wouldn’t leave Mina alone in the dirt. She wouldn’t have to turn into one of these forgotten trees. Not here. Not alone, in the coming winter cold.
Katia drove back toward the cabin in a much darker mood. She knew the road wouldn’t run close to the barn, and she felt more confident driving the vehicle this time, but that confidence only made it possible for her to think about everything over and over.
When she saw Steve’s cabin again, the plan in her mind was no longer a wild dream but a plan in motion. It was Ryan she had to win over. He was the one who understood the bad things that people were capable of doing to each other. He hadn’t told her much out about what he’d been through, but she had picked up enough from his conversations with Steve to know that he had been held hostage in Afghanistan and had only recently made his way out of there. He still had a restless energy about him that she imaged came from that experience, and from the fragile freedom that had followed.
Jenny was the one who was the most likely to oppose her. She was up to something, but Katia couldn’t say what for sure. Maybe it was just the money, but probably something else was going on there too. She was definitely trouble. She’d been with Mats, after all, and it wasn’t impossible that she also had a stake in all this too somehow.
Katia turned the wheel one last time and finally approached the cabin. She saw Steve on the porch outside, getting to his feet, holding a hand over his eyes to block out the sun as he peered right at her. He began to pace in her direction.
Katia gripped the steering wheel tighter with her hands. This was it now. Life or death.
No, that wasn’t right. There would certainly be death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JENNY COUNTED THE money from Katia’s backpack in the bathroom sink. She wouldn’t take more than they’d asked for, which was fifty thousand Euros. She still didn’t know where the money came from, not exactly, but it made sense that fifty thousand of it was money Mats had handled before he died, and that the rest was some other money their business had generated. Still they were only asking her for the fifty, which meant that they probably considered the other money lost, or didn’t know about it, or maybe would try to collect it elsewhere. If the latter was the case Jenny wasn’t the only person they would shove against a wall today, but she couldn’t afford to think about that now.
She paused with her counting at forty thousand, the next bill still in her hand. It had dawned on her that she had another serious responsibility to consider. She could hand over all the money and thus settle everything with Alex and Roman, but it wouldn’t erase what Mats had done in the back of that van.
He must have killed one of the girls, a young girl just like Katia. Jenny had tried to avoid that conclusion, but now she saw no way around it. He had killed a girl, probably by accident, precisely how he’d done most things in his life, and Alex and Roman had somehow found out and even taken pictures. They’d wanted him to pay for that, and that’s what this money was for. It was the only plausible scenario she could think of. Mats had actually killed someone.
Her hands began to tremble and watched the rest of the money fall out of her hands into the sink. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were wide, her skin pale, her forehead wrinkled in worry. Turning her eyes downward, she forced herself to focus on the money once again, her pile of forty thousand, approximately half in five hundred bills and the other in one hundreds. It would have been far easier to count it all if she had separated the different kinds of bills to begin with, and been even easier if she had only used the larger bills. She should’ve seen that advantage earlier. After all, she was used to working with money at the hotel, but there they had a CashGuard machine that swallowed the money before the piles got this large. And most people used credit cards anyway.
She counted out another twenty of the largest bills to complete her pile. It was much too bulky to fit in a wallet or the small handbag she had brought with her. Her plan was to leave with the money as soon as Katia returned, and if that didn’t happen soon enough, then she’d simply sneak out and hike along the river until she reached the bridge to take her into town. It would likely take an hour, but she would probably get a lift once she was up on the main road.
What she really needed right now was a money pouch, the kind that people used when they traveled and didn’t want to flash their wallets. Sometimes people carried these pouches under their jackets or coats. She would make one from plastic wrap and some tape, and her clothes were baggy enough to cover it all up, but she’d have to get to the kitchen for the supplies to make it.
She stuffed the money into her pockets, pulled her blouse over the obvious bulges, and gathered the money that remained in her hands. She listened with an ear against the door, and then cracked it open. The bedroom was empty. She left the surplus money on the floor, along with the backpack, and stepped out into the bedroom.
She was still alone, and so continued forward. Ryan was outside somewhere, fully out of view from the hallway. She went to the kitchen and looked out the window. Steve was walking away from the cabin, waving with his hand, and she realized Katia was just returning. Time was up.
She went through the kitchen drawers and quickly found a roll of tape in one and a plastic bag in another. It wasn’t the kind of wrap she had wanted, but the bag would probably be better. She put the fifty thousand in the bag, pulled her sweater up, and pressed the bag against her skin. She pulled the tape roll with her other hand and wrapped the tape halfway around her body, then switched hands and completed the circumference. It would be painful to rip off when she had to, but at least it would work.
She looked out the window again and saw the Land Rover roll toward the entrance, grinding gravel under its tires before it came to a complete halt. Katia got out, wearing a camouflage coat and holding a camera in her hand.
Jenny felt the money taped under her clothing getting hot against her skin.
It was time to make her move.
* * * *
Ryan had heard the Land Rover returning and picked up his pace until he broke into a full run. He had been trekking down the river, hoping to find a path along the water that would take him back to his abandoned car, but the rocky terrain was difficult to navigate, and he hadn’t made much progress.
He crossed the final stretch of beach at full speed and then felt his balance wavering. Focusing on the open front door, however, kept him upright and moving forward, step by step, over slippery sand and gravel.
He heard Katia in the hallway, with Steve and Jenny, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He climbed the steps and made his way inside, then stopped in his tracks, startled by her appearance. She looked wild in the fatigues with makeup smeared, and holding a camera in her hand like a weapon.
“Are you all right?” he asked, still panting hard as he stepped forward.
“What about the camera?” Steve asked. “What did you—“
Ryan held up a hand to silence him and moved forward. “You took pictures?”
Katia nodded. Her gaze moved between Ryan and Steve and then back again. “Yes”, she finally said. “I took pictures. I’ll show you.”
She stepped into the bedroom and Ryan followed, pulling the door almost completely shut behind him. Katia was showing them a great deal of trust right now, and he didn’t want to risk that in any way. Steve had a way of startling her, and Jenny had just fought her over the backpack, so alone, with the door slightly ajar, seemed to be the way to go.
He helped her transfer the photos to the computer, shots of young girls locked up in a barn, if he understood the context correctly. Some of the faces he recognized from the passports he had looked through.
“How many did you see?” he asked.
“Five. That’s everybody now.”
“Are you sure?” Ryan could very well imagine what would happen to the last hostage left behind. Such a person would be a liability and of little value to the kidnappers, since their business required a certain scale to be economical. But he realized he was thinking of a particular girl. When he went through the passports he had pondered two girls who shared similar features and the same last name, and so far he had only seen one of them. He pointed at her face in the best close-up he could find. “Has she got a sister?”
Katia turned her face away and nodded. “We buried her in the forest.”
“She died?”
“They made us dig for hours.” Tears were welling up in her eyes, Ryan saw, but then she steeled herself. “They just sat there and watched. Sergei and Roman and Dimitri. They kept laughing, but in the end they had to dig themselves. We couldn’t dig deep enough. The ground was so hard. It was so cold.”
“They killed her?”
Katia nodded and wiped more tears away. It was chilling, how matter-of-fact she was about such horror. It was an obvious reality for her that these men had the power to kill at will.