I moved to the room from which I'd heard screaming, repeated the procedure, taking the soft entry, slow on the knob, gentle with the door. There was no noise from inside as it swung open. A mattress was on the floor, thin and naked with an old bloodstain at its center, no other furniture, not even a pillow.
There was a girl inside, Pakistani perhaps, not older than thirteen. She huddled in the corner opposite the mattress, in a T-shirt and panties, and when she saw me she wrapped her head in her arms, buried her face against her knees, attempting to disappear.
“It's okay,” I whispered. “It's okay.”
And because I was a liar and it absolutely wasn't, I moved on.
There was another “bedroom” on the ground floor, this one occupied by two girls. As in the previous room, they were huddled together in fear, the arms of the elder around the shoulders of the younger. The younger appeared about the same age as the Pakistani girl I'd seen, though this one I thought was from India. The older girl looked CIS, maybe Russian or Ukrainian.
She was also visibly pregnant.
“Tiasa,” I said. “Tiasa Lagidze.”
Nothing in response. Their fear was palpable, it was something I could smell, something I could taste in the stuffy air. I checked the hallway again, looking toward the stairs, straining to hear the sound of any movement from above, then glanced back at the two girls. They were too afraid to even look at me.
“How many?” I asked, then repeated it in Russian. “How many men here? How many keeping you here?”
The pregnant girl raised her eyes. They were big and brown and maybe just a little bit hopeful. She held up her right hand, five fingers splayed.
One left
, I thought.
“You're going to hear more shooting.” I kept my voice soft, sticking with Russian. “Stay still. I'll come back when it's over.”
I shut the door silently, checked the hall again. Above me, a floorboard creaked. The close air and the heat had me perspiring heavily, and I could feel sweat running down my neck, making my glasses slip on my nose. The stairs loomed at the end of the hall, narrow and dangerous and offering me no other choice. Stairs were a trap, one of the few tactical situations where nothing was on your side. They offered no mobility, no scope, no eyelines. The last man was on the floor above me, and he knew, like I knew, that the only way to reach him was the stairs, straight up the mother of all fatal funnels and into a blind turn.
I backed down the hall the direction I had come, watching the stairs until the corner. I turned, stepped over the bodies blocking the door to the front room, entered low. The man in the
dishdasha
was where I'd left him. I sidestepped over to the
sheesha
, lifted it in one hand and dumped the contents of the water pipe on him. He spluttered, gagging.
I put the Beretta to his neck and forced him to his feet. He nearly fell when he tried to put weight on his broken knee, his face creasing with pain.
“Stay silent, you might live through this,” I told him.
He bit down on his suffering, nostrils flaring as he fought to control his breathing, jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscles working. As much fear as the girls carried, he doubled it in hatred, and every ounce of that hatred was directed at me.
“We're going upstairs,” I whispered to him. “You first.”
Carefully, keeping the Beretta on him, we moved back into the inner hall. At the corner, I pulled him around, put him in front of me. He needed a hand on the wall to steady himself.
“Go,” I told him. “Keep it slow. Not a word, not a sound.”
He looked back at me with my gun, decided that was enough persuasion to do as I said, and began hobbling slowly toward the stairs. I followed a few feet before stopping, keeping distance, letting him lead me.
The stairs were hard for him, and his progress slowed even further. One step at a time, careful, painful, measured. It wasn't that different from how I'd have climbed the stairs, knowing what was waiting for me at the top.
Whoever was up there thought so, too.
The shots came at an angle, blowing through the drywall on the right-hand side, angled down, a long chatter from another assault rifle. Only a few hit the man in the
dishdasha
, and he slammed against the left wall, then tumbled back down the stairs in a heap, head over heels until he was sprawled on the floor, broken and dead.
I brought up the Beretta and waited. I didn't have to wait more than a minute, but it felt longer. Sweat slipped down my back and into my eyes, making them sting. Then I heard the floorboards creaking again, the rustle of movement, and I saw the feet on the stairs, black sneakers. Then the legs, the barrel of an AK, and that was enough for me. I put one from the Beretta into the left sneaker, heard the scream, watched the last man fall face-first down the stairs, onto the body of the man in the
dishdasha
. He'd managed to keep hold of the AK when he fell.
I shot him twice more, and made sure he'd never be able to use it again.
CHAPTER
Sixteen
There were eight girls in all. The eldest of them was
around seventeen. The youngest, I think, was eleven. I don't know. I didn't have the heart to ask.
Tiasa wasn't among them.
I went room to room, telling them to get dressed as quickly as they could, trying to get them mobilized. Aside from the pregnant girl, there was another who understood my Russian, and a third girl who could manage in pidgin English. I asked if any of them knew how to drive, and the pregnant girl did.
“Where are you from?” I asked her.
“Volgograd.”
I gave her the keys to the Toyota SUV that I'd found on the man in the
dishdasha
.
“Go to the Al Maidan Tower on Al-Maktoum Road,” I told her. “It's easy to find, just follow the signs. Go straight there, straight to the Russian Federation Consulate, it's on the third floor. Take all of the girls with you. Tell them where you were, what they did to you. Leave me out of it.”
“I understand.”
Together, we hustled the girls out of the building, to the Toyota. The camp had begun to stir, and a couple of the men there watched us pass without expression or comment or apparent interest. The girls shuffled, some of them crying. Mostly, they seemed numb, very much in shock.
Before they were all loaded, I stopped one of the girls, the other one who'd understood my Russian. I'd seen her before, on Vladek's BlackBerry, the picture of her smiling as she believed his lies. It hadn't been more than ten days since he'd shipped her to Turkey, but all the same, I had to check the smartphone to be sure.
“Wait,” I told her.
She looked at me with alarm, the fear that had begun dissipating instantly in evidence again.
I brought up Tiasa's picture on the BlackBerry. She cringed at the sight of the smartphone in my hand, perhaps recognizing it as Vladek's, perhaps simply because of the association it held. She started to bring a hand to her face, to hide it from the camera, before she realized that I was trying to show her something on the screen.
“This girl,” I said. “Do you know her? Have you seen her?”
She shook her head, anxious.
“The man in Georgia,” I said. “The man who sold you, he sold her, too. That man can't hurt you. He'll never hurt you again. It's all right, you can tell me the truth.”
She bit her lip, then nodded.
“You remember her?”
“I remember her. Tiasa. She was… she cried all the time.”
“I was told she was here, that she came with you and some others to Dubai. Do you know where she is? Do you know where I can find her?”
The girl shook her head.
“You don't know?”
The girl looked to the SUV, where the others were waiting for her to join them. The engine started up. She looked back to me, afraid of telling me something I didn't want to hear.
“She didn't come to Dubai,” the girl said.
“You're sure?”
“She didn't come to Dubai.”
“Do you know where she went? Do you know what happened to her?”
“Please, mister…”
“Do you know where they took her?”
“No!” The girl was nearing tears. “No, I don't know, I swear. Please, please can I go? Please can I go now?”
I saw then that she was shivering despite the heat.
I helped her into the SUV. I closed the door. The vehicle pulled out almost immediately.
I looked at the picture of Tiasa Lagidze on the BlackBerry for a few seconds. Then I switched to check for messages. Like my search for Tiasa, the result was identical.
I had nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER
Seventeen
They'd burned my home to the ground
.
I sat behind the wheel of the Škoda Danil Joshi had rented all of fifty minutes earlier at the airport in Batumi, listening to the engine idle and the rain beat against the roof, to the whine of the wiper blades swiping at the beads of water trickling down the windshield. It was after midnight, and the only illumination came from the headlights on the car, and while the picture was incomplete, it was enough, and I could feel my pulse beating in my temples.
The fire had burned hot. Blackened concrete broke through the rubble of charred wood and glass, the fractured pieces of the house's foundation. If anyone had come to fight the blaze,
they'd come too late. It had been left to burn itself out. The only structure still resembling a structure at all was our little studio. Two of its walls and the roof had gone entirely. One mirror, cracked and charred, still hung within, reflecting light back at me.
The Benz, parked where we always parked it, was a burnt-out husk.
I got out of the car, into air bitter with smoke and the aftertaste of gasoline, the stench mixing with the new moisture falling from the sky. The rain was cold, but I didn't much feel it, because I'd seen something on the ground, glittering in headlights.
Shell casings.
Then I saw the discolored earth, and I knelt and touched it, brought my hand back so I could see my fingers in the light, a thin film of bloody mud on them now. I wiped my hand on my pants leg, standing up again.
Now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing a lot of shell casings, and at least one other patch of ground that might've been a blood spill. This one was much closer to what had once been our front door, and maybe it had come from someone trying to get inside.
And maybe it had come from someone trying to get out.
The Benz was a diesel, after all, and that wasn't what I was smelling. I was smelling petrol. I was smelling Molotov cocktails.
Gasoline burns exceptionally fast, and it burns incredibly hot. Fast enough that two or three or four thrown in the right places would create an instant inferno. Hot enough to bring a building to its foundation. If Miata and Alena had been inside, they wouldn't have had time to do anything much more than flee.
And then shell casings.
It was the Benz that scared me most of all, because it was still here. Whoever had burned our home had lit the car, too, stealing that avenue of escape. Probably had lit it at the same time they'd set fire to the house. So Alena had been here when they came.
It was now almost forty hours since we'd been meant to check in with each other, and still Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry gave me nothing but silence.
I was going to have to look through the ruins, I realized.
I was going to have to look for Alena's body.
After seeing the SUV on its way, I'd headed back inside and, as quickly as I could manage, gone through the rest of the building, looking for anything that might point to Tiasa's whereabouts. It was a fool's errand, and I was rewarded like a fool for it, coming away with nothing. One of the beds in one of the rooms actually had a sheet on it, and I used that to fashion a makeshift sack, loading it with every weapon I'd touched.
The keys to the new BMW sedan had been in the pocket of the last man I checked, the last man I'd killed. No more than ten minutes after seeing the SUV depart, I pulled out, cramming as much distance between myself and the work camp as quickly as I could, speeding back toward Dubai. Given the way most of the drivers handled the road, you couldn't tell I was in a hurry.
Back in the city, I continued past the hotel, turning off Sheikh Zayed and taking Umm Hurair to the Al-Maktoum Bridge, across the Dubai Creek. I turned off again, parking near the Dhow Wharfage. Despite its name, the Dubai Creek is not, in fact, a creek, but rather a major inlet from the Arabian Gulf,
deep and wide enough that it effectively cuts the city in half. Traversing it requires the use of one of two bridges, a tunnel, or a ride on an
abra
, one the local water taxis.
I left the keys in the BMW, but took my sack with me, then found a waiting
abra
, piloted by a long, thin, and sandblasted old man. None of my languages worked on him, but he understood both my gestures and the sixty dirham I gave him well enough. We started out, angling more northward, toward the mouth to the Gulf. Once we were about midway across, I dropped the sack overboard. The old pilot watched me without a change of expression or a word. When we made the other side, I gave him another hundred dirham. He said something in Arabic, laughed, and pulled away.
I caught a cab back to the Marina, stopped at the concierge desk on the way through the lobby, and told the impeccably coiffed man working there that I needed the soonest flight I could get back home to Georgia, which was hardly a lie. Then I told him I'd be down within twenty minutes to check out, and he promised me he'd have something by then.
