The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) (32 page)

“According to my grandfather’s research,” Sasha continued, “Milo Stasic’s company was called Tresinmerc. Why do you think Agvan is the same operation?”

“I don’t think so, I know so.” I had printed out the “About Us” company description, and I read it aloud to the others, concluding with: “
Our father and uncle dedicated their lives to supplying quality product from around the world. We aim to continue that tradition. Agvan Supply’s specialty is difficult-to-find foodstuffs; the rarer the item, the harder we will work to bring it to you.
”

Mila spat out a Bosnian invective, adding “Evil men!” in English.

Sasha’s response was much more measured. “Yes, this makes sense. According to my grandfather’s notes, Milo Stasic, Grandmother Irena’s first husband, or rather, his company, Tresinmerc, was partly responsible for brokering a major trade agreement between the governments of India and Yugoslavia, in the early sixties. They exported industrial goods to India. Machinery, tools, sometimes even entire industrial plants and equipment.

“India paid Yugoslavia a fortune for these items. In return, Yugoslavia imported foodstuffs from them: fresh fruits, cashews. Also tea, coffee, tobacco, like that. Plus hard to find items, like shark oil and Bengal tigers.” He shrugged. “The agreement was a bit lopsided. My grandfather had downloaded the actual treaty and added his own commentary in a separate document: ‘Worse than robbery!’ he’d said. And, ‘The people always lose!’ He wasn’t a big fan of profit-based business practices, such as Tresinmerc’s.”

Long ago, first father rich. Very good at stealing sheep.

“Anyway, after Tito died, Tresinmerc went into a decline. Almost went bankrupt, more than once, including when Milo’s brother Jovan died in the late 1980s. Then the Bosnian War happened, and soon after the Dayton Accords, Uncle Zarko and Uncle Stojan took over.”

“And mangoes and cheese came to mean a different thing entirely,” I said.

“What prompted your grandfather to look into Tresinmerc in the first place?” Bill asked. That was Bill, always drilling down to the core, asking the key question.

“I think it started because Grandmother Irena got so strange. According to his notes, she’d been disappearing for days, and spent hours and hours praying in their bedroom. It really bothered him that she started to wear a hijab, you know, a robe and headscarf again. When he challenged her about it, she spouted all this nonsense about a new world order and kept mentioning Tresinmerc. Praising her first husband, Milo Stasic, and their sons Zarko and Stojan.”

Mila broke in. “With me, too, she does this! Tells me I have to go with her to meet new imam. Take Sasha to meet his uncles. That big change is coming. I tell her I will die before I do these things!”

I thought over this new information.

Sasha drained his mug of tea. “Anyway, after I found this disc, I picked up the investigation where my grandfather left off, and it led me pretty quickly to the human trafficking trade in Sarajevo. I started a blog, which hooked me up with other people trying to put a brake on the explosion of the sex slave industry in the Baltics.” His voice softened. “That’s how I met Audrey.”

He drifted off for a moment. We waited.

“But a month in,” he said, “Tresinmerc shut down its operations, and I couldn’t figure out where they’d gone. Next thing you know, someone was messing with my own website and blog. My followers kept getting error messages when they tried to log on.” His eyes glinted, and I saw Mila’s fire in his look of determination. “You know what? They did me a favor! I’d gotten wind of those two little boys, and Audrey and I decided to take action against the monsters, instead of just writing about them.”

“And then you lost the trail,” I said, remembering.

“Right, I lost the trail, here in Los Angeles. The rest you know. I’d pretty much given up on ever finding my uncles, or those kids, until Ten called, asking me about Agvan Supply. It got me thinking.”

“Sasha comes to me right after,” Mila said, eyeing her son with pride. “And we come to you.”

Bill was pulling at his upper lip furiously. Sasha watched as his father’s cop-mind went to work, fascinated by the turning of the wheels despite some residual resistance to the holder of the brain.

Mila’s brow was ploughed deeper than ever with furrows. She clenched and unclenched her hands, as if itching for a fight. I could definitely see why she assumed one or both of her brothers had murdered her father. If he’d chosen to expose Tresinmerc’s new line of business, he could not only bring the company down, but also land his stepsons in jail.

I still wasn’t sure where Irena fit in, though. Or how the brothers had managed to move their operations so secretly and easily. There had to be an international connection—companies didn’t just die in one country and reincarnate in another like that. And now, Agvan Supply was headed underground as well.

Bill had left his chair and was pacing the borders of my living room, hands shoved deep in his pockets.

He halted. “Are we agreed that catching these fuckers is the goal?”

“Yes,” I said.

“
Da,
” said Mila.

“Plus finding those two little boys,” I added. Sasha shot me a grateful look.

Bill nodded. He rocked back on his heels.

Here it comes.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Bill said. “Number one: we need to get in contact with Zarko and his brother. Mila, do you have any way of calling them?”

Mila shook her head. “I have not talked to them since before my father is killed.”

“Sasha?”

Sasha, too, shook his head.

“I might,” I said. I held up Ponytail’s throwaway phone, a piece of my one-man, ongoing investigation. “I’ll bet the guy I took this from used it to call Zarko the minute he spotted me spying on them in Moorpark. He’d have needed to ask for instructions.”

I flipped open the phone, powered it on, and checked recent calls against the date and time in question. Sure enough, on the Saturday, at 4:27
A.M.
, he’d made a call to the initial
Z,
at a 213 exchange.

“Mila, do you have your own cell phone here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I have.”

“Can you make calls in the states with it?”

“I can with mine,” Sasha jumped in. “Audrey upgraded my data package before I left. So we could, you know, talk.”

“That’s good,” Bill said. “We’ll use yours.”

Sasha nodded, but his eyes asked
Why?

“If Zarko’s on the run, he might not pick up a local call,” I explained. “But he probably won’t be able to resist a call with a Sarajevo exchange.”

“Number two,” Bill said. “If we’re going to hook them, we need bait.”

“I have bait,” Sasha said. “I have this.” He held up his grandfather’s DVD.

Bill glowed with pride. “Brilliant,” he said.

Sasha pulled out his phone as if to start punching in numbers there and then.

No.

“No,” Bill and Mila said at the same time.

“It can’t be you, Son,” Bill said. “They know you to be their enemy. And it can’t be me, or Ten either, for that matter. They’d never go for it.”

“I will call.” Mila’s hot eyes gave a split-second view into a depth of hatred unfamiliar to me. “I know these men. I know how to deal with pure evil.”

That word again. At Dorje Yidam, we were taught that good and evil weren’t exclusive unto themselves, but rather two elements of the same whole, opposites forever linked, along with right and wrong, truth and ignorance, love and hatred. To embrace such contradictions was the first step in finding the middle way, in learning to walk the eightfold path, and the only hope for a life lived in balance.

“Ten,” Bill said. “Let’s take a little walk.”

Bill and I moved onto the deck, but not before I’d grabbed two Belgian Chimay Whites from the fridge, and poured them with care into two wide-mouthed glass steins.

We hoisted the steins to observe the rich, foamy heads; took our first slow swigs; and even sighed in unison after swallowing, like synchronized swimmers.

Bill gazed across the canyon, but his focus was elsewhere. “So what do you think?”

“I think Mila’s our only play,” I said. “And a complete long shot.”

“If I know her, she’s going after them whatever we decide,” Bill said. “Sasha, too.” He shook his head. “I mean,
if
Zarko Stasic answers, and
if
he agrees to meet, both huge
ifs,
she’s walking into a fucking dragon’s lair, and we have no way to protect her. No way I’m letting that happen. Too dangerous.”

I took a second perfect pull of a beer in perfect balance. Smooth and harsh. Bitter and sweet. I craned my head to look into the kitchen window. Mila stood by the sink, rinsing our tea mugs, her brow creased. Fierce, like the protectress Palden Lhamo.

You like to clean up your little piece of the world. You’re after justice above all, even if it means bending the rules.

Mila dried her hands on the seat of her pants. She wore her usual uniform: jeans and a men’s button-down shirt tied at the waist.

I turned back. “I have an idea,” I said.

First I talked, and Bill listened. Then we leaned against the railing, running potential scenarios and outcomes past each other.

Just like old times.

We reached the same conclusion: everything went back to that warehouse in Van Nuys—the address in Sasha’s missing persons file that Bill first discovered was the hub of a wheel that connected Sarajevo, Agvan Supply, NDRSNT, and us.

The sky was a bowl of faded blue, and as I watched, a thin slice of pale moon materialized, as if by magic, just above the tree line. Tank had followed us out, and pushed his way between my legs.

I turned to my friend and previous partner.

“You know this is totally nuts, right?”

“Yeah,” Bill said. Then: “Isn’t it great?”

C
HAPTER
29

Mila entered Zarko’s number into Sasha’s phone and put the call on speaker.

I counted the rings: one, two, three,
he’s not going to answer,
four …

“
Da?
”

Mila said, “Zarko? I am Mila. Mila Radovic.”

The silence stretched, until it was so thin I thought the room itself would snap.

“I am surprised. You said you no want to speak to me again. Why you call now?”

“I need to see you.”

“What for?”

“I have something you want.”

During this next soundless gap the phone seemed to go dead.

“Zarko?”

“Why you speak in English?”

Mila picked up the phone, turning off the speaker and switching to Bosnian with impressive speed and smoothness. In her native tongue, her engine accelerated from zero to sixty in about ten seconds flat, until she was battering Zarko with a long burst of vocal bullets.

Sasha offered a whispered translation, as best he could. “She says now she will do the talking. She says she’s here in town.”

“
Ne!
” Mila said, and spat out another round of guttural venom.

“She says ‘No!’” Sasha gave Bill an apologetic look. “She says she’s not here with you, that you turned out to be a bigger asshole than ever. She’s here on her own.”

Now Mila listened for a bit. “Yah! Yah!” she said, and then: “
Ne!
”

I heard Sasha’s name several times.

“She says she’s made me stop what I’m doing, because she found something that might endanger all of us. Bring shame to our name. That she wants to turn it over to Zarko. She says I got in too deep, that she’s afraid, and only Zarko can fix it.”

Smart,
I thought. Appeal to his ego.

“Yah! Yah!” She mimed writing something down, her gesture urgent, and Bill passed her his notebook and pen.

We’d underlined how critical it was that Mila insist the meet take place at the Agvan Supply site. I just hoped she remembered. The air around her rippled with tension, and her cheeks were ablaze. She might have gone completely off the rails.

She ended the call. Her chest heaved from the exertion of the exchange, like an Olympic sprinter at the end of a close race. Once again, I found myself admiring the ferocity of her commitment.

“So?” Bill’s eyebrows migrated to midforehead. “What’s his answer?”

“He will do it,” she said. “We meet at Agvan Supply, in about one hour. I tell him I am by the airport, so he gave me directions for taking a taxi from there.”

I went into my bedroom and retrieved what I needed from my safe.

“Here,” I said, and passed over a men’s button-down shirt.

She inspected it, curious.

“Third button down,” I said. “And Bill, you’re not seeing this.”

Way before my time, if you wanted to record something in secret, it took a portable, reel-to-reel tape recorder the size of a shoe box and weighing at least ten pounds, plus a wired microphone head taped to the chest—sure to leave a raw strip of hairless skin upon removal. The rig was very dangerous and way too easy to find with a pat down.

And before that, in Sherlock’s day, your only chance to eavesdrop was an ear to a door, or an eye to a peephole. Come to think of it, someone, somewhere must have started it all by hiding under the house’s eaves, as if to find shelter from the raindrops.

But like so much else, spying had gone wireless, micro, and much, much harder to detect. A tiny, covert wireless camera and recorder, small enough to hide in a pen cap, or, in this case, a shirt button, was not only available, it was legal. The tricky part, legally speaking, lay with streaming the event in question to another site.

Thanks to a wealthy former client—a real estate scion determined to catch his business partner making commissions on the side—I’d been able to purchase, on his dime, a nano-size, high-resolution, wireless video and audio kit.

And thanks to Mike, my laptop computer was set up to receive the stream.

Mila returned from my bedroom with the shirt knotted around her waist. It looked good on her—even better, it looked normal. I showed her how to activate the camera, and we checked the feed on my laptop. A fairly clear image of Bill from the waist down appeared. We’d be seeing a lot of midriffs.