by Dana Haynes
She pulled him back up and Mason puked down the front of his blood-sodden shirt.
“Serbia. Whored-out refugee children.”
Mason drooled blood and beer and breakfast down his front. He gasped for air. “Jesus … you bitch …” He tried to struggle but had no leverage. He pawed for the Smith he kept in a kidney holster. The holster was empty.
Finnigan had taken it; set it on the table.
Fiero said, “How much do we have left?”
“Lessee …” Finnigan took Mason’s wallet, started rifling through his money. “Mason’s got, ah, twelve hundred in euros. Figure, if a broken nose goes for three …”
Mason raised both hands, palms forward, fingers splayed, and blinked blood out of his eyes. “Okay! All right! All right!” He spat to clear his mouth. The pain was like a drizzle of Tabasco oozing through his skull.
“Basha! Driton Basha! He runs”—Mason spat again—“runs all the kids coming outta Serbia!”
Fiero said, “Who is he?”
“I don’t know! I sell to pimps, time to time! Okay? They say Driton Basha! I don’t ask questions.”
He blinked tears out of his eyes.
Finnigan thumbed through his wallet and took out his Italian driver’s license, pink laminate with Patente Di Guida and Repubblica Italiana in the upper corners.
He said, “Thanks, man. The name Driton Basha doesn’t pan out, we come back. If it does, and we find out you’ve talked to him, or to anyone mobbed up in Serbia, then we give him this and tell ’em we chatted. Yeah?”
“Fucking …” He tried wiping his face, and the searing pain from his nose made him weep.
Finnigan reached into his jacket pocket and produced a human figure, six inches high, with a base. It was painted lead; a cowboy twirling a lariat over his head. It looked just like the figurine that stood on the table at the entrance to Mason’s apartment, where he kept his keys.
Finnigan said, “Here’s the other news. We stopped at your place before coming here. We found a shitload of coke behind your fridge, dude. Like, enough to distribute to friends and family. I’ll be honest with you: I’m a cop. Once I saw all that blow, I felt obligated to contact Pietro Calpano at the Carabinieri. He runs the drugs and vice squad in Milan. You know him? Good guy. Terrible tennis player. Pietro appreciated the tip, said they’d hit your apartment about, ah …” Finnigan checked his watch.
Mason groaned. “You son of a—”
“I was you, I’d lay low for a while. They might have the tags for that kick-ass Stingray; I don’t know. But I wouldn’t bet my freedom on it. I’d get out of Italy fast as I could. You got friends elsewhere? I’d go hang out in Elsewhere.”
Mason tried to breathe through his mouth.
Fiero reached for Mason’s gun and took out the bullets, dumping them in his pocket. He stood and nodded to Fiero. “We good?”
Fiero deadpanned him through her shades. “Barbie?”
“I thought it was funny.”
“Ken has no genitalia.”
They moved toward the door. Finnigan left all of Mason’s money in front of the bartender, turned back to his partner. “Was hoping you wouldn’t go there.”
C09
Azaz, Syria
The refugee caravan wisely avoided Aleppo, the site of major fighting for well over two years. Jane had seen the international wire stories, with photos of bomb-devastated neighborhoods, of total destruction that brought to mind the Allied bombing of Berlin or Dresden. She repressed her emotions when conducting interviews; shared them via Skype with her girlfriend back home.
Azaz, they were assured, would be the preferred stopping point before making the transition into Turkey.
By now the refugee caravan had joined many, many others. Jane Koury estimated that three thousand people were camped out in the perimeter of the fallow farmland outside the town. But Tamer Awad had been checking stories on the net and knew that the refugee population of Azaz was closer to twenty thousand. “There are other camps, dotted all over,” he told her that night. “This is one of the smaller ones.”
Jane interviewed Mohamed and Amira Bakour several times. Theirs was not a snapshot story, she understood. They were on a journey, and, if possible, Jane wanted to stay with them until they reached Europe. The parents liked her, and had noticed that Mohamed, fifteen, lost a little of his angry edge as he talked to the young Londoner. Amira, thirteen, had turned the reporter into some kind of idol. The parents laughed when Amira began pronouncing words with a strange, London dialect, mimicking her newfound friend.
The Irish Times had picked up four of Jane’s stories. And, to her delight and amazement, a wire service had selected two of them, which appeared first in the Guardian, then the Boston Globe. Tamer’s photos were amazing and evocative, and the decision to focus on just the Bakour siblings now seemed brilliant. It’s impossible for an audience to identify with twenty thousand traumatized people camping outside Azaz. But easy to identify with an angry big brother and his shell-shocked little sister.
That night, Tamer Awad paid another family for two cans of Fresca from an ice chest and the journalists popped them by moonlight, toasting the cans together. “I’m selling photos to Getty Images,” Tamer said with a wicked grin. “Don’t tell your uncle, but when we get to Ankara, I’m putting out my résumé to every paper in Europe.”
“You’re not going back to Hama?” Jane asked, nudging his shoulder.
“Your uncle is a great and scholarly man—may the Prophet bless his household—but he pays crap.”
“Don’t settle for just any paper.” Jane sipped her soda, felt the carbonation tickle her nose. “You’re going to be a staff photographer for the London Times. Or the New York Times. You’ll see.”
Tamer grinned in the night. “You’re the big gun here, Jinan. Don’t think I don’t know it. I’m just hitching a ride on your comet.”
Jane beamed with pride. She huddled her squall coat around her narrow shoulders. “Turkey?”
“Tomorrow. There’s a Red Cross / Red Crescent camp just on the other side of the border, due north on the D.850.” Tamer pointed toward the glow of the highway, which connects Northwestern Syria with Turkey. “It’s going to take the family the better part of a day, maybe two, to get through the checkpoint. I recommend we hustle and get through first, and wait for them in the camp.”
“Sounds good. Ready for a hike in Turkey?”
“Thankfully, the Koran specifically says that penitent women must always carry the camera bag. I looked it up. Just be grateful I didn’t bring tripods.”
“It says that, does it?” She nestled in next to her friend. “We’ll see.”
C10
Nicosia, Cyprus
Lachlan Sumner flew the de Havilland back to the firm’s operating base in Kyrenia, where the partners took care of such mundane responsibilities as laundry and Lachlan restocked the seaplane. Nobody was happy about breaking off the investigation, but the birthday of Fiero’s mother wasn’t to be missed. Not without reverberations that would last throughout the year.
Alexandro Fiero, Katalin’s father, was a director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, the agency dedicated to peace and collaboration between nations, and protecting the world’s cultural sites. He was also executive director of a Spanish philanthropy known as the Galician Trust. He co-owned two or three—or possibly four—companies, and sat on the boards of directors for a handful of others. Finnigan honestly couldn’t keep up on how the patrician Spaniard defined my job from week to week. His diverse interests kept him flying constantly from European capital to capital, and he averaged less than a week per month back home in Madrid.
Her mother, Khadija Dahar, traveled almost as much and almost never to the same destinations. As a liberal, pro-Euro political academic, who wore the traditional hijab with Saint Laurent
, she’d become a darling of the Left, appearing on television and in debates as the New European Muslim Woman.
Her daughter often thought that the New European Muslim Woman was a bit like Cro-Magnon Man: the skeletal remains of a bygone era. But she didn’t say that at home.
Since none of the three family members could be trusted to appear in Madrid on the same week, Finnigan had suggested they meet in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. Fiero objected; she wanted to keep her family as far away from St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking as possible. But Finnigan argued that the capital would suffice. And her parents did know she was living on the island situated in the Eastern Mediterranean, like the center pivot of a clock that ticked off time, clockwise, between Greece at ten o’clock, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt at six o’clock.
Nicosia is the last split capital on earth, like Berlin before it. The south is controlled by the Greece-friendly Cypriot government, while the north is occupied by Turkish troops who invaded in 1974. Of course, Turkish Cypriots often said the south was occupied by Greece. Political affairs are, as usual, a matter of perspective.
Drive around Nicosia, and you have to cross United Nations checkpoints. Cut through the middle of the capital, and you cross the Green Line—a Cypriot border station with Cypriot police in one shack, with all signage in Greek, and twenty paces on, a Turkish border station with Turkish soldiers checking passports.
The inner, walled city of Nicosia includes a vibrant pedestrian-only sector stuffed with shops, restaurants, and hotels. On the Greek side, business is vibrant and the foot traffic heavy. The same is true, to a lesser degree, on the Turkish side. But the Turkish side also includes a winding dead zone: gray, half-demolished buildings with missing roofs, mortar holes, and the remnants of tank treads, exactly one block wide and running the entire length of the Green Line. No remnants of the 1974 civil war are evident on the Greek side; they’re hard to miss on the Turkish side.
As neutral territory for a Fiero Family reunion, Nicosia couldn’t be beat. Alexandro could rhapsodize about the economic potential of the island, and Khadija could admire the secular Muslim culture of the north. And, as Finnigan often said, the coffee on both sides was spectacular. If you didn’t like Greek food, there was Turkish fair aplenty, “and if you didn’t like either, then you should die with a freezer full of tofu.”
Finnigan chose a Lebanese place on the south side, on the pedestrian-only thoroughfare but tucked away enough to be invisible to the mainly Russian, British, and British Commonwealth tourists. Lebanese food is neutral, so Katalin’s parents would have a hard time picking a fight over favoritism.
Finnigan wore a relatively nice blazer and black trousers with loafers. He’d even shaved. He thought he looked urbane and sophisticated. Most everyone else thought he looked like a graduate student doing his impression of a grown-up.
Fiero wore a flowing skirt of sky blue and a blush-pink sweater under a jacket, with riding boots. The outfit made Finnigan grin; he was used to her in either bad-girl leathers, or power suits of midnight black. None of that wardrobe ever made an appearance when Fiero and her mom came within shouting distance of each other.
Fiero could switch to a fashionable look in an instant and, with her hair in a low knot and parted in the middle, she immediately looked like she fit in as a stylish young Madrileña. Her tote bag felt uncomfortably light on her shoulder; no weapons.
She wouldn’t wear the hijab. She accepted her own lack of faith, and didn’t care if her parents had a problem with that.
Finnigan didn’t say anything, knowing that Fiero was subconsciously frustrated that her überliberal parents didn’t protest her position on faith.
They drove the Land Rover from Kyrenia to the northern sector of Nicosia, parking on the Turkish side near the Roccas Bastion, one of the rounded orillons that made the oval city wall look, from the air, like a giant gear.
“Now look,” Finnigan said, “this is important. I can’t say it enough. Your parents like me. Don’t embarrass me.”
She smiled brightly and took his elbow as they approached the Green Line checkpoint. “Go fuck a camel.”
Alexandro Fiero had flown in from Berlin and Khadija Dahar had flown in from New York City. They’d taken separate cabs from the island’s main airport outside Larnaca and arrived thirty minutes apart.
Finnigan’s choice of restaurants was inspired. They started with salads of tabbouleh and fattoush, then switched to spicy batata harra, meatballs in tomato sauce, fried cauliflower and halva, the sweet sesame paste studded with fruit and nuts, for dessert. Alexander ordered Lebanese and Greek wines like the connoisseur he was.
The couple adored Finnigan, as the only man their daughter had ever brought home from her work.
It was the work part that worried Fiero.
To the world at large, the partners used the cover of St Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking, a maritime recovery company. Thanks to the opaque and blatantly criminal nature of Cypriot banks and corporate law, they had successfully hidden their real job, and real profits, therein.
But that wouldn’t work for their parents. Neither Alexandro and Khadija, nor Finnigan’s extended family, where likely to believe that either of them knew the first thing about maritime salvage.
It had been their friend Thomas Shannon Greyson who’d come up with a cover for the families. As far as their kin knew, Finnigan and Fiero lived on Cyprus and worked as analysts for the European Union. They were pencil pushers in an obscure and enormous transnational government entity, gathering statistics on violence, to help set policy in Brussels.
The job had three advantages: First, it sounded far too boring for a lot of questions. Second, Fiero had been a soldier; Finnigan had been both a city cop and a US Marshal. Their families might well believe they’d taken desk jobs that still revolved around the data of violence, if not real violence. And third, the EU is so massive, so bloated of personnel, that they ran little risk of their parents knowing someone who could rumble them.
“So important, this work,” Khadija Dahar said—speaking to Finnigan and not to her daughter, three inches of bangles jangling on each forearm. “Information is power. Those who gather information are every bit the soldiers as those with guns. More so.”
She sipped her wine. She might have been born Muslim, but she brought very few of the cultural taboos with her.
Alexandro Fiero spoke at length about the tech revolution and the information economy, urging his daughter and the fine young American to think about what happens after their time as analysts for the EU. “I am glad, very glad, that you chose civil service,” he pronounced to his child. “When you joined the army … well, a waste of education and brilliance, alas.”
“When was that?” Finnigan asked, because it was his job to keep the light conversation moving forward; a skill his partner utterly lacked.
“Right after the bombings, of course,” Alexandro said. Katalin stiffened, attention on her halva. “For the US, it was September 2001. But for the Spanish, it was the train bombings in 2004. A week after—the craters still smoldering—and Katalin joined the military. Her mother …” Alexandro mimed his wife’s head exploding.
“No, no,” Khadija interjected, reaching across the feast to pour wine into Finnigan’s glass. “Service is important. I was honored—proud! Katalin’s instincts were the instincts of any good citizen. Of course, I was pleased when she took a civilian position with the European Union. Pleased that someone took notice of Katalin’s intelligence and education, and knew instantly that she could best help with a computer. Not crawling in some trench with a rifle. And here we are!”
Finnigan sipped his wine. “And here we are!”
Everyone toasted.
Fiero finished her halva without glancing up from the table.
Michael Finnigan wasn’t an idiot. He’d never had any intention of going into business with anyone without doing a thorough
background check. Up to, and most definitely including, an illegal background check.
He wasn’t ever supposed to know Fiero’s backstory; indeed, almost no one did.
Katalin Fiero Dahar had grown up as a complete jock. She’d crewed yachts in the Mediterranean. She’d played soccer (football, he corrected himself). She competed in the biathlon, the competition that involved cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. Indeed, she’d made the Spanish national team before turning nineteen.
But within twenty-four hours of the Madrid bombings of 2004, Fiero joined the Spanish Army with the intention of being a soldier. But within the first weeks of boot camp, the recruiters for the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia realized they had something special in the intelligent, educated, and athletic young woman.
Katalin could shoot. Period.
This skill came to the attention of Hugo Llorente, the éminence grise of Spanish Intelligence. For more than three decades, Llorente had run a quiet little bureau within CNI, with a forgettable budget and a low profile. Hundreds of bureaucrats in Madrid had fallen asleep over the department’s turgid quarterly reports.
None of them knew that Llorente’s division was, to use the colloquialism of international intelligence, a kill shop.
It was Hugo Llorente who first understood what they had in Katalin Fiero Dahar. Here was a woman who could shoot people.
Could, and did, and slept well enough afterward.
Plus she was a polyglot. And stunning. The combination was too much for Llorente to turn down.
Her transition into his elite intelligence unit had happened as soon as she turned twenty-two. She stayed until she turned twenty-eight. There were no records anywhere of her confirmed kills.
Michael Finnigan knew the right people, though. He pieced together her history as a shooter.
One week after he’d confirmed her bona fides, the Turkish occupying government of northern Cyprus OK’d the articles of incorporation for St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking.