The day after they closed the wound in my side, Bridgett drove me back to Dublin, this time to drop me off at the airport, rather than to pick me up. I was clean-shaven, wearing my new suit and a clean shirt, with a new pair of glasses that Bridgett had gotten made for me at a one-hour place while I'd been sleeping most of the previous day away. The stitches in my side itched, the skin tight, and again I was suffering cotton-mouth, but now it was due to the antibiotics I was taking, and not from the fact that I was in compensated shock. While I'd been unconscious, Alena and Bridgett had also sewn up the cut in my forearm. My palm they'd left to a bandage and more superglue.
“You have any reason to believe this place you're going to in Nevada will get you what you want?”
“None at all,” I said. “But I think the information is accurate.”
“Why's that?”
“Because the guy who gave it to me believed I would kill him if it wasn't.”
“Did you?” She didn't take her eyes off the road.
“No,” I said.
Bridgett slowed to pay the toll over the River Liffey. Dublin spread out to the east, hidden in the rain. As she accelerated again, she said, “Guy sells people into slavery.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Explain this to me.”
“Explain what?”
“That fucker didn't deserve to live. But you let him go.”
“You think I should have punched his ticket?”
“If anyone was going to do it…”
“I thought about it,” I admitted. “This other guy, too, Arzu Kaya. Pure piece of human excrement, that one. I thought about killing them both.”
“But you didn't.”
I shook my head.
“Why didn't you?”
“It's not about them,” I said. “It's about me.”
I'd booked my flight as Matthew Twigg, flying Continental to Seattle via Newark. Maybe it was because I'd been doing so damn much travel, maybe it was because I'd be flying into the U.S. again, but I took extra precautions this time to reinforce my cover. I abandoned the duffel that had seen me through the last four weeks of globe-trotting, exchanging it for a nice leather two-piece set, one rolling bag, the other a messenger. The rolling bag I loaded with clothes and appropriate toiletries. The messenger carried my laptop and its attendant cables, as well as copies of The Financial Times and The Economist. I still had Bakhar's little black book and Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry, as well. The little black book I kept in the messenger bag. The BlackBerry I put in a case on my hip, even going so far as to buy a Bluetooth headset for it.
Just your run-of-the-mill globe-trotting financial wizard, that was me.
The problem wasn't with the paper, per se, but with the itineraries. One-way tickets raise eyebrows amongst those who look for such things. While the passport that Nicholas Sargenti had supplied for Matthew Twigg had plenty of international travel attributed to it already, nowhere was there an entry stamp for Ireland. In and of itself, that wasn't extraordinary; most of the EU didn't bother for travel between member nations. But it was another anomaly, along with the one-way itinerary, and it made me nervous.
And sure enough, I was popped coming through customs in Newark.
“How long have you been away, Mr. Twigg?”
“Ten days,” I said. “Had a deal to close in Dublin, then took a day to visit the Rock of Cashel.”
He nodded slightly, flipping slowly through my passport beneath the purple glow of the blacklight by his terminal. There were plenty of ways he could determine that I was lying, but none of them were quick. Despite whatever efforts governments made to convince people of the contrary, his terminal didn't have a global database of travelers and their itineraries.
“They didn't stamp your entry,” the agent said. “Next time you want to make sure they do, all right?”
“They didn't?”
“Nah, I'm not seeing it.”
He marked my passport, whacked it with his stamp, and handed it back.
“Welcome home,” he told me.
I followed the connecting flight all the way through to SeaTac. It was after ten when I arrived, and I found myself a room at a budget hotel near the airport, booked myself on the earliest flight I could find the next morning to Las Vegas. I took a shower, careful to keep the stitches on my arm and side dry, which actually took some doing, and when I was finished, I felt like I still had a film of soap and sweat clinging to my body. I set the alarm on the BlackBerry to wake me with plenty of time for the flight, then killed the lights and lay on my back on the bed, with the television on low for company.
Theunis Mesick hadn't been able to give me much. He had been, he explained, the middleman. Arzu had handled the money, arranged the sales, as he had arranged the sale of Tiasa. Mesick's job had been to transport her from Trabzon and to take her, via Amsterdam, to the U.S. For doing this, Arzu had paid him almost twenty thousand euros. Mesick had been smart enough not to mention anything else he might have done with Tiasa, which had probably saved his life; if he'd confirmed what I suspected, that he, like all the men before him, had raped her, I'd likely have killed him then and there, and to hell with the rumblings of my conscience.
Mesick had simply been another link in the supply chain, and his information supported that. The only names he knew were Arzu's and Karataev's. He'd been given a phone number to use once he'd reached Las Vegas with Tiasa and told to call it using a prepaid cell phone. When he did, instead of a person, he always reached an answering machine. He would leave a message with the number of his phone, and within an hour of doing so would receive a text message telling him when and where to make the delivery.
It was a clean system, very difficult to trace back, and one that left nothing incriminating in its wake.
Mesick had been sincerely unable to remember the number, despite my threats, but it didn't really matter. The number he was told to call had never been the same one twice. Even had he been able to recall it, I was certain that all it would get me would be an out-of-service message. If the people on this end of the supply line weren't all using prepaid cell phones as well, they were fools. And I knew already that they weren't.
What Mesick had given me instead were directions to the drop site, where he'd brought Tiasa. Why he could recall that and not a phone number I didn't know, and it made me suspicious.
That Arzu had set me up by sending me to Mesick wasn't lost on me. Nor was the fact that I'd left both men alive. But Mesick was convinced Arzu was dead. Unless Arzu managed to buy himself out of lockup, there was no reason for Mesick to believe otherwise. And if I believed Mesick's information-and I didn't see much choice-then Mesick had no way of warning whoever had Tiasa that I was coming.
It wasn't ideal at all, but it was as close to a level playing field as I was likely to get.
It was 101 degrees when I arrived in Las Vegas at eight in the morning. By the time I'd rented a car and checked into a hotel room well away from the Strip, it was ten, the mercury was kissing 108 and still climbing.
My rental had a Magellan GPS unit, and I used it, in conjunction with a newly purchased map, to plot myself a course out of town, heading northeast on Interstate 15. Vegas thinned, then dwindled, giving way to new developments peppering both sides of the highway, some of them left only partially constructed. The housing crash had clearly taken a boot to the nuts of Las Vegas.
Mesick hadn't had an address as much as a location, and with only his directions to go by, the doubt came gleefully creeping back as the Mojave Desert stretched itself out on all sides. After half an hour I passed the turnoff to the Valley of Fire Highway, and that was in keeping with what he'd told me. I stuck to the interstate as he had done, wondering what Tiasa had seen of the landscape, what she had made of this alien world. Wondering if she had been afraid still, or again, or if she'd felt nothing, turned numb by it all.
Some fifty miles out of Vegas, I turned off the highway, making south. Cropped buttes rose to the east and west as I continued away from the interstate. I began to see the first cautious indications of community again, faded road signs pointing me to places called Amber and Glassand. I even saw some green in the distance, where Lake Mead terminated into the Moapa Valley south of me, wresting fertile soil from the desert. Seeing the green would've given Tiasa hope, I thought.
But Mesick hadn't taken her that far.
A dirt road cut off the blacktop, heading east, and I followed it perhaps two hundred yards, the car leaving a cloud of dust in my wake. The road ended as insolently as it had begun, stopping without warning at two cinderblock buildings, each of them easily a sixth the size of the cottage I'd left in Ballygar. I stopped the car, letting the engine run, waiting to see if anyone would emerge from the structures. No one did. Neither of the buildings had windows that I could see. On the one furthest away, perhaps twenty meters, I saw a small satellite dish on the roof, and a compressor for an air conditioner.
I killed the engine and got out. It was furiously hot, as bad as Dubai, but devoid of even the barest humidity, the sunlight bright enough to hurt the eyes. I waited, listening, but there was no sound, nothing. Not wind, not traffic, nothing. I might as well have been standing in a vacuum.
The nearer of the two buildings, the one without the satellite dish, was unlocked. I pushed the door open, then stood in the doorway, waiting for my eyes to adjust. The stench of baked urine and shit washed out at me. I stepped inside, looking around, and quickly learned that there was almost nothing here to see. An empty plastic jerry can lay on its side by the door, and beside it a dented and weathered galvanized bucket. There were no fixtures, no sockets, and I doubted the building ever used power, let alone had been wired for it. I picked up the jerry can, stepped outside with it, trying to get fresh air, then uncapped it and gave it a sniff. There was no scent at all.
I looked back into the building, stomach churning, and no longer from the smell. It wasn't a building; it was a cell. That was probably how it was done. Mesick or someone like him would bring a girl to the location, lock her into the building, then retreat. There were literally hundreds of places in the surrounding terrain where someone could set up overwatch and never be seen. Lying in cover with a pair of binoculars and a bottle of Gatorade, the watcher would confirm the delivery, wait for however long they deemed prudent upon the trafficker's departure, and then move in for the pickup.
Meanwhile, a terrified girl would be trapped in a cinderblock hotbox. Here's a jerry can of water and a bucket to crap in, little girl, someone'll be back for you later.
I threw the jerry can back inside, headed for the second building. The door was metal, same as the first had been, but this time was chained shut, the links held fast with a padlock. I pounded hard on it with my right fist, but there was no response. I thought maybe I was hearing a fan running. When I pulled on the padlock, it didn't give.
I hadn't thought it would.
Eight miles south was Glassand. I found a mom-and-pop hardware store and bought myself some bolt cutters, then went around the corner and found a mom-and-pop grocery, where I picked up two liter bottles of water. I finished one bottle driving back the way I'd come, returning to find that nothing had been disturbed. Even the dust had settled once more.
The bolt cutters went through the padlock exactly the way they were designed to. I yanked the chain free and kicked the door open, nervous about what I might find. But there was no stench, no body, nothing like that. Just stale air being pushed around by the whirring air conditioner, and a folding table pressed against the far wall. On the table was a laptop computer, hooked to a power outlet. Another cable ran up the wall, presumably to the sat dish on the roof. Connected to the computer was a cheap cell phone, also on power from the outlet.
I gave the room another looking over before moving inside, thinking that people this careful might well be the kinds of people who set booby traps. Nothing gave me cause for alarm-at least, not more than I'd seen already. I approached the computer, not touching it. A green light glowed at its front, and when I leaned my head down toward it, I could just make out the sound of its internal fans going, struggling to keep the machine cool. The monitor was dark. I looked at the phone next, again not touching anything, and it was on, and while the signal strength I was reading on its screen wasn't terribly strong, it was enough that I knew the phone had reception.
I clicked the button beneath the trackpad on the laptop. The screen flickered to life, an ocean-green background and a password prompt. I considered, then typed in the words “you sons of bitches,” running them all together without spaces. I knew it wasn't going to work, and wasn't surprised when the computer told me as much.
What surprised me was the message that followed.
PASSWORD INCORRECT. TWO ATTEMPTS REMAINING.
PLEASE WAIT TEN MINUTES BEFORE NEXT ATTEMPT.
Then the screen went dark again.
That was unusual enough to give me pause, to make me realize that I had, finally, hit a true dead end. The warning and the ten-minute wait said it all; however the computer was protected, it was serious encryption. I wasn't going to get through with blind luck or by trying to reboot the machine.
I looked at the phone again, putting what was before me together with what I'd learned from Mesick. Whoever Arzu and he had dealt with on this end had outdone themselves in the anonymity department. Someone would call into the phone, and the computer would answer, then forward whatever message was left via either text or email. Whoever received the message could then respond with a text or email of their own, sent back to the computer, where it would in turn be routed to the initial caller.
It was elegant and insulated and there was no way that I could see to crack it. All the phones concerned were certainly prepaid cellular, which meant I had no means to trace ownership, especially if whoever had set up the coms system was in the habit of changing the ones they used regularly, which was a given. Getting into the computer would take an expert and time, and while I could think of a few places to find experts in Las Vegas, while I might even be able to spare the time, in the end, I wasn't certain it would be worth the effort. The best I would get would be, perhaps, an archive of messages sent and received, none of which would be incriminating in and of itself. Any phone numbers I found would be useless.
The other option I could think of, at the moment, was to look at the land, dig around in county records, find out who owned the buildings, who was paying the power bills. But like trying to chase down the numbers, I could see how that would end, too. Someone careful enough to have gone to these lengths for their coms wasn't going to drop the ball when it came to leaving a paper trail. Even if I managed to trace ownership back through one or two or however many shells and blinds, the odds were I'd end with a farmer who received a cashier's check promptly on the fifteenth of each month for the use of his land, and it was unlikely even then that he'd know who actually was sending him the money.
It felt like Dubai again, and not only because of the heat. For a good five minutes, I stood in that stifling little room, wondering what to do next. I could only think of one thing.
With the bolt cutters, I smashed the computer to pieces. Then I went after the phone. I told myself that I was doing it to put a dent in their finely tuned operation, that, if nothing else, it would slow them down a little while, at least until they found a new place, a new computer, a new phone. They would have to rebuild, set up new protocols. It would take time before they got their system up and running again.
Just not very much time.
For most of the drive back to Vegas, I didn't think much of anything. I felt tired, not just in need of sleep, but truly weary. The stitches in my side and forearm hurt, and the skin along my left palm had begun to itch in earnest, now that my hand was starting to heal. When I'd been swinging the bolt cutters, I'd maybe been swinging harder than I should have done.
I stopped for a meal at a diner on the way back to my hotel because I felt I should, rather than because I had any appetite for it. There were multiple racks of free newspapers, nothing more than collections of ads, just inside the entrance, almost all of them telling me that women with names like Juliette and Morgana and Devyne would be happy to take my money to make me happy. A couple of the ads actually used words like “fresh” and “young” and even “barely legal.”
It made me think of Kekela, and then I was thinking of Tiasa yet again. When my meal came, I found I couldn't even bring myself to take a bite of it. I paid, left, picked up more water at a convenience store, and finally returned to my room.
I didn't know what to do next.
There were options, of course. Kekela had spoken of the “mongers” when we'd visited Rattlesnake, the men who frequented whores, who made it a game. There were mongers everywhere, certainly here in Las Vegas. With a couple of days, I could probably locate a few. With a couple of weeks, I could maybe earn their trust enough to find the specialists, the ones who knew where to find girls so young that, even in a state with legalized prostitution, they remained hidden.
Or I could head back to Amsterdam. I could chase down Mesick, see if there was something I'd missed, something he had held back. I could go further, to Trabzon, and renew my acquaintance with Captain Çelik, and hope to grab more time alone with Arzu Kaya. I could rewind the clock all the way to Georgia, and hope that Mgelika Iashvili knew more than he'd said, had one last crumb for me to follow.
Or you could let it all go, I told myself. You could just walk away.
But even thinking that, I knew that I couldn't.
One month of chasing after Tiasa Lagidze had led me here. Four weeks that had shattered the life Alena and I had built for ourselves, and in so doing, had also destroyed the walls I had put between the man I had been and the man I had become. Iashvili had said we were the walking dead, Alena and I, and he'd been right, but not in the way he imagined. Like Bakhar Lagidze, I hadn't left my past behind; I'd tried to bury it, alive and kicking, and it had come back on me the same as it had come back on him. Ten men dead by my hand in Batumi and Dubai was the proof.
Everything had brought me here, the same way it had brought Tiasa.
Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick.
And one other person, at the end of the line. One person, and I didn't have the first idea where to look.
Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick…
It hadn't just been any supply chain, I realized. It had been their supply chain. I'd thought that the connection had been between Bakhar and Karataev, that there had been nothing to tie Bakhar to Arzu. Yet there was Arzu connecting to Mesick, and Mesick saying he had brought girls to the U.S., to Nevada, before.
I opened the laptop, brought up Vladek Karataev's files from his BlackBerry, began going through the entries in his address book one at a time. There was nothing that looked like a phone number for somewhere in the States, certainly nothing that looked like one for Nevada. I combed through them a second time, and got the same result.
But there had to be a connection.
Bakhar's little black book was in the messenger bag, where I'd left it, and I dug it out, started going through it again. Same thing, nothing with a U.S. area code, nothing that looked like a number for Nevada. I went back to the listings from the BlackBerry, began comparing each entry, one at a time, alphabetically.
Under the ??, Bakhar had an entry, “Pretty.” The number, at first glance, was for Ukraine, with a 380 country code prefix. The number ended in 207. When I checked Karataev's, I found an entry under the word krasívyj, which also meant “pretty.” The numbers weren't identical; Karataev's first four digits were different. But like in Bakhar's book, the number ended in 207.
Reversed, the number began 702.
702 was one of the two area codes in use for the state of Nevada. I knew that, because it was on the goddamn telephone on the desk right before my eyes.
I had two possible phone numbers for “pretty” in Nevada. Whoever the hell that was. If they were still in service. If they were real numbers. If they weren't actually for somebody or some establishment in Ukraine.
Using the BlackBerry seemed like bad luck, like tempting fate, never mind how many times I had changed SIMs on the thing. I used the telephone on the desk instead, hit 9 for an outside line, and dialed the number from Karataev's listing, thinking that one would be the most current.
It rang. Four times.
Then a woman said, “This is Bella.”
“Bella,” I said. “I understand you're the person to talk to if I'm looking for some company.”