by Jayne, Chris
But she knew she hadn’t. As the city of Tirana flashed under the airplane, and Angela heard the wheels of the jet crank down for landing, she risked one whispered question. In careful Albanian, she asked, “Will I stay here?” It was a reasonable thing to wonder about. She’d been whisked out of Albania at age nine with no warning. Might she not be brought back just as unexpectedly?
“No,” Vanna responded in the same language. “No. It is a visit only. One day. It was thought you might like to see your family.” Her face was bland and emotionless. “Then you will be taken to Mont Blanc to ski with your friends.”
From the Tirana airport, a car, very much like the vehicle a village chief drove to Ajola’s house those many years earlier, drove Vanna and Ajola into the countryside. While the car was driving, Vanna handed Ajola a change of clothes. The skinny jeans, designer tee shirt and fashionable long sweater were gone, replaced with a coarse black shirt, baggy brown trousers, and a black headscarf. Ajola changed obediently, too numb to notice or even care that the driver was leering back in the mirror.
She slept then, for a while, and when she awoke, the car was lurching along a rough gravel road, old stone houses on either side. They were in the mountains, almost to the village where Ajola had grown up.
There, they passed the farm on the outskirts, but to Ajola’s shock, did not stop, and went on to a much larger house, two stories, near the center of town. Her family was there, waiting in a front room that now had a sofa, a television, and even art on the walls.
Within five minutes, Ajola understood everything. Her parents were no longer farmers but now owned the town’s green grocery, her little sister Nora had glasses, her mother’s kitchen had a small refrigerator. All this was because of her.
They’d gotten a lot more than a pig out of the deal. And everything that had been given, could be taken away.
After the first few minutes, the sobs, the tears, the reluctant embrace from a baby who had been still at the breast when she left and was now a ten-year-old boy, and the fact that there were two more children whose names she did not know, when everything different had been processed, only then did Ajola see the one thing that had not changed.
Her grandmother sat in the corner of the kitchen on an ancient rocking chair. She still dressed in the old style, the dark xhubleta, a skirt made of many strips of felted cloth, a colorful vest, and a dark black kerchief. Ajola tried to calculate quickly when she saw her. How old must she be, now?
Really, by American standards, not so old, Ajola realized. She had been her parents’ firstborn. If Ajola was now eighteen, her mother was still just barely forty. Ajola knew that her mother had been one of the grandmother’s younger children, so she had been perhaps thirty-five when her mother was born. That still made the grandmother only seventy-five years old.
Slowly, Ajola had walked to her grandmother and realized that there was one change: the woman was now blind or nearly so. Her hands groped the air, desperately seeking. Ajola fell to her knees and put her head on her grandmother’s coarse apron.
“I knew you would come back some day,” her grandmother had whispered, bending her head down to Ajola’s ear.
Ajola had raised her head. “I couldn’t…” The Albanian was awkward and harsh on her tongue, but it was getting easier already.
“Hush, now,” her grandmother had whispered. “Are they here? The ones who bought you?”
Ajola froze. Carefully appearing to adjust only her position, she risked a glance behind. Vanna was accepting a cup of hot tea from her mother in the front room, and her back was turned. The driver, whomever he was, had not even come inside. “Yes,” she responded, murmuring low into her grandmother’s skirt, “but not in the kitchen.” For a second, her grandmother did not respond, and Ajola went on in a quiet rush, understanding exactly what her grandmother had said and what it meant. Her parents had sold her. “I did not understand.”
“Hush,” Grandmother said, for the second time in a minute, “how could you? You were a child. Nine years old, but now you must get away from them, any way you can. Do not worry about us here. Do not throw your life into evil because of your fear. Do not let yourself become a peng for us.” The Albanian word she used, peng, was not a word known to nine-year-old Ajola, but well-educated eighteen-year-old Angela who was heading to Yale guessed its English translation: hostage.
Just then, the youngest child of the house, a wide-eyed boy of three or four, walked up to Ajola slowly. “Are you my sister?”
Kneeling, Ajola was just at his eye level. “I am. What is your name?”
“Kejsi,” he answered. “I’m four.”
Desperately Ajola turned back to her grandmother, and caught at her grandmother’s hands. “How can I risk all of you? How can I risk him?” She stumbled over the words, but she was certain her grandmother got her meaning.
Tears rolled down the old woman’s leathery cheeks. “Do not let them make you repay evil with more evil. What have they asked you to do?”
“Nothing, Grandmother, nothing at all. I go to school. I am not allowed to speak Albanian, but other than that, nothing.” Ajola broke off, let the words hang, because she saw everything clearly now. She was being groomed for something. She wasn’t sure what, but the fine schools, the applications to the most elite colleges, the emphasis on excellence in sports, it was all leading somewhere. “I don’t know.” Both of the older sisters that had lived with her American family were now gone. The oldest was finishing college and going to law school in the fall; the second was attending the Air Force Academy.
Angela risked another glance into the front room. Vanna was nowhere to be seen and Ajola guessed that she may have excused herself to use the house’s toilet. Ajola had to think of something, fast. “Is there a way I can contact you? Contact the family?”
“In the village, your father is a big man now,” the grandmother hissed. “He knows the rules. If he knew of it, he would tell them you had contacted us. May his candle be put out,” she muttered the old Albanian curse. It was clear she thought little of her son-in-law.
“There must be someone. Someone Father does not know,” Ajola whispered desperately, plowing ahead even as her brain reeled from the idea that her father would betray her.
Her grandmother shook her head, no, then suddenly her thin hands clutched her like claws. “My brother. My brother,” she repeated. “His name is Tarek Shala and he went to Italy.” He’d been there many years, Ajola realized, because she remembered already when she had been a child, her grandmother talking about a brother that had been lucky enough to make it to Italy.
Quickly the old woman recited an address to Ajola, and Ajola frantically repeated it, trying to commit it to memory. “For you to write to us here from America, too dangerous. But you can write to him, and he can get a message to me.”
A hand like a vise closed around Ajola’s upper arm and she was yanked to her feet and turned. It was the driver. Had he been watching through the window? She had not seen him or heard him come in. “You two have a lot to say,” he commented cynically.
What had he overheard? Ajola’s stomach jumped sickly.
Just then, Vanna rushed up. “What’s this?” Her face was also hard and suspicious with surprise, as she looked back and forth between Ajola and the driver.
Grandmother reached her hands up, her blind eyes seeing nothing. “Where are you? Where are you?” she cried, and instantly Ajola heard what she was doing. She had changed her speech to the dialect she had spoken as a child, a rough mountain dialect, more Romanian than Albanian, now almost totally gone.
Ajola picked up the pretense. “I can barely understand her,” she stammered. “I forgot she hardly speaks Albanian at all.”
Vanna gave the grandmother a hard look. “Go to sleep now, Gjyshe,” she ordered and pulled Ajola along. “Come, your mother wants to see more of you.” With one final suspicious glance at the blind old woman, she pulled Ajola back to the front room.
On the plane between Washin
gton and Miami, Angela relived that other plane trip, now twelve years in the past. Her grandmother’s plan had worked. Angela had been able to reach her Great Uncle Tarek in Italy, and he had been able to mail carefully worded messages to another brother who then delivered them in person to their sister, whom he visited once or twice a month. For almost ten years, Angela got regular, although delayed, news about her family from Tarek.
First one sister, then a second got married. Her brother had been selected to go to the national boarding school in Tirana. Her father’s green grocery business expanded to a second shop in another town, run by one of his daughters and her husband.
Once Angela was out of college, she and Tarek had taken to communicating via telephone. Angela had obtained a secret cell phone that she only turned on once or twice a month, and used solely to call Tarek.
Then one day, the call was not answered. She tried again two days later: same result. Two weeks later, the phone went to a message that Angela could not understand. After another week went by with no answer, she took the phone to a friend at the FBI who spoke Italian. Indifferently, the friend listened to the message and translated. It was the Italian equivalent of “this number is out of service.”
Angela panicked, certain she and her great uncle had been found out, but, as days, then weeks, went by with no untoward consequences, more reasonable explanations intervened. It was far more likely that Tarek had simply died. He was an old man, younger than her grandmother to be sure, but still over seventy. He had died and his phone had been canceled, and that was the end of it. Angela was safe, but now she had no way of reaching her grandmother or her mother, the only two family members in on the secret.
In just three weeks, she was going to rectify that. She was taking a long awaited vacation, to Rome, Florence, Pompeii, all tourist things she’d never seen, and nothing that should cause anyone at the FBI to question her plans.
Except she was not going to see any of it. As soon as she was sure she was not being watched, she was going to go to the village where Tarek had lived to see if she could find out what had happened to him. Then she wasn’t going to stay in Italy. One could, she had discovered, take a ferry from Italy to Albania, and security on those ferries was mostly directed at keeping Albanians out of Italy. An American on an overnight trip was likely to have her passport glanced at, nothing more.
Angela was going to risk going home. She had to see her family. She had to know.
Angela had largely fallen away from the Catholic traditions of her childhood. Along with the Albanian language, church attendance was something that was completely avoided after she became Angela Jones. But now, as the plane dropped down to Miami, she said a small prayer, defiantly in Albanian, to the newly sainted Mother Theresa, to protect her from whatever evil was planned for her.
Only three weeks. Would she make it?
Chapter 26
Deacon
Thursday
10:00 AM Mountain Time
Hobson, Montana
* * *
Deacon stepped into the farmhouse kitchen. Sandy Kaplan stood at the sink, washing up breakfast dishes, but his sister-in-law was nowhere to be seen. “Do you know where Lou is?” he asked. “I need to know when she wants to go into Lewiston.” Now that Roger and Louise’s freezer had been retrieved from Bowenville, Deacon intended to make good on his promise to take his sister-in-law back to the Warehouse Club and fill that freezer with a couple hundred pounds of meat for the winter.
Sandy turned, wiping her wet hands on a dishtowel. “I think she went out to the barn to find Roger.”
Deacon wandered off the porch, towards the barn. He totally understood his brother and sister-in-law’s frustration with their new house. It wasn’t much to look at and it was a lot smaller than their newly built log home at Bowenville had been. Still, this location, much closer to the mountains, was, to Deacon’s eye, much nicer than Bowenville. This private property was like a little paradise, and not for the first time since he’d arrived on Monday, did Deacon consider what he was going to do when he got out of the military. His twenty was up in three years, and although he hadn’t told anyone yet, that was going to be it for him. He wanted a wife, he wanted a family, he wanted… Well, he thought, looking around, he wanted this.
Was forty too old to start a family? He hoped not.
Deacon approached the barn and heard voices, tones that sounded raised, frustrated, even angry. Normally, he would have turned away as soon as he knew he was overhearing a private conversation, but his brother’s first words stopped him in his tracks.
“Lori called you? Let me get this straight. Your sister Lori who you’ve barely spoken to in five years.” It was a flat declarative sentence, not a question.
“Yes, Roger. I already told you.”
Roger was clearly not going to allow his litany to be interrupted, and he went on as if his wife hadn’t spoken. “She said she’s in trouble, and doesn’t tell you why.”
“No. I mean yes. She did tell me why.”
“When was this?”
“On Monday. While you were at the airport getting Deke.”
“Monday.” Roger paused. “This is Thursday, Lou.”
“I know it’s Thursday.”
“Why didn’t you tell me then?” Deacon could hear the confusion in his brother’s voice.
“Because… I don’t know. Everything she said was sort of jumbled and didn’t make a lot of sense, and I didn’t want to say anything if it turned out to be nothing.”
“So, what’s going on? What did she say?”
“On Monday? Not a lot. Only that she and the kids were in real danger and they had to get out of Miami.” There was a long pause. “She wanted to know if they could come here.”
“Here? Here? To Montana. What the hell… How is she getting here?”
“She said they were going to drive. They couldn’t fly because they couldn’t risk using ID.”
“Louise, that’s crazy. It’s got to be 3,000 miles from Miami to here.”
“2,500. Maybe a little more.” Louise paused. “I looked it up.”
“Oh, well, that’s much better,” Roger said sarcastically. “And she’s driving that with the kids? By herself.”
“She has an au pair from France, and she’s with them too.”
“An au pair?”
“It’s like a nanny.”
“A nanny,” he repeated. “And tell me again why you didn’t think your husband should know about this on Monday?”
“Because I didn’t think she’d really do it, I guess. But she called again last night. That was the phone call when we were eating.”
“And?”
“She’s in Oklahoma City. Or she was last night.”
“Let me get this straight. Your bat-shit crazy sister calls you up out of the blue, after barely speaking to you in years, says she’s in trouble, and proceeds to announce that she’s driving more than 2,000 miles with two kids and a nanny to visit us. Did she tell you why? Why she is in so much danger that she can’t use her ID to fly?” Deacon could hear the skepticism in his brother’s voice. “Was it something to do with drugs? My God, has your sister gotten involved with drugs somehow?”
“No, I don’t think so Roger.”
“What then?”
“Apparently a senator was killed in Miami on Sunday night.”
“A United States senator?” Roger interrupted. “Oh man, I saw something about that on the TV screen when I was sitting in the coffee shop waiting for Deke. It was in Miami. Kyle… Kyle something. The sound was off, so I was reading it on the ticker, and not paying much attention, but that’s the guy?”
“Kyle Michaels. He was the senator from Florida. She wouldn’t tell me everything, said she didn’t want to until she got here, but she said the story that is out in the press isn’t true.”
“What?” Now, Roger’s voice dripped skepticism. “Not true? What, is the guy not dead?”
“He’s dead, but how it happened? She said
that’s what’s not true.”
“What would could your sister possibly have to do with politics? How could she know a senator?”
“Roger, she’s one of the best caterers in Miami, does a lot of fancy parties. You wouldn’t believe the people she’s met. She saw something she shouldn’t have. I’m not sure exactly what, but now the people who did this are chasing her. And there’s more. That’s why she called last night. Her picture’s on the news.”
“What?” Roger’s voice went high with tension and Deacon felt his own stomach clench. If the media had the story and was running with it, he knew there had to be something real here. “What’s her number? I’m going to call her. This is ridiculous.”
“Roger. Roger, no. She said she was taking the chip or card or whatever you call it out of her phone. I know she has a disposable phone, but last night she called me from a pay phone. She was worried they could track her phone, even a disposable.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t even have a way to get in touch with her.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“Just that if anyone called or came looking for her - police, FBI, anyone, - to not trust them. That if anyone called, we should say that yes, she called us and that she was going to visit a friend in Los Angeles.”
“Not trust the FBI?” There was a long pause. “Does she even have a friend in Los Angeles?”
“No, that’s completely made up. But she hoped that it might confuse people who were looking for her. If they called us.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“Lori said we couldn’t trust anyone. That I shouldn’t tell anyone. She didn’t even really want me to tell you yet.”
“You said she was in Oklahoma City.”
“Yeah, last night. That’s where she called from. She was hoping to get here by Friday night, but her little girl, Grace, is sick, and she didn’t know if she could drive today.”
“So, we just have to sit here, and wait, not knowing where she is and not knowing if the FBI is going to show up? And what if your sister is right, and someone is chasing her? She’s leading them right here.”