But at least I know how to keep him talking.
“It sounds to me like you’re frightened,” I say. “It sounds like you want this all to go away. Like you realize what an enormous mistake you’ve made.”
Another static burst. Laughter. But he doesn’t hang up.
I keep going. “Sorry. There is no reset button for you. You screwed up. You were stupid. And now you’re going to have to pay for it.”
I think it must be the word “stupid” that does it, because even with the voice modulator, I hear real emotion, real anger, in his voice when he responds.
“You think—” He pauses. “You think I’m—” Another pause. “You idiot. You think your cheap little freak-show talent is going to keep you safe? I told you that you did not want me to concentrate on you. I gave you every chance to walk away. Now it’s too late. Now I’m making you a priority.”
stack: got him
I see the message and smile.
“I look forward to it,” I say, and hang up.
Let him stew with that for a while. He’s going to see me. Sooner than he thinks.
///19
I’m Here for Bogdan
We got a police escort to the Reykjavík airport. It was not an honor or even a courtesy. More like a bouncer seeing us to the door. An unsmiling police lieutenant named Jonsson personally escorted us to the steps of the Gulfstream Sara chartered. His mind was colder than the frozen tarmac we were walking on, and the only glimmer of happiness he felt was when we began to close the plane’s hatch. I took a quick peek inside his thoughts, and found out he’d been made aware of the near riot at the club near our hotel. He knew we were involved, but decided the best course of action was simply to get rid of us as fast as possible. Still, it chafed his sense of order and responsibility. Unsurprisingly, he did not invite us to come back anytime soon.
He returned our guns, at least.
Sara spends the flight napping, still feeling the effects of the vodka poisoning her system. I am grateful for that. As soon as she falls asleep, I finally stop getting the fumes of her hangover through my own brain.
While she sleeps I make the mistake of turning on CNN again.
“A high school cheerleader in a suburb of Chicago has been forced to flee her home after being targeted by what’s being called the antisocial media site, Downvote. The sixteen-year-old victim was tagged as a ‘mean girl’ and ‘stuck-up’ on the site, and nearly a million people began repeating rape and death threats against her across the Internet. After her address was posted to the site, her home was hit by gunfire in what police say was a drive-by shooting sometime around three a.m. She and her family were then taken into protective custody, and the house was then mobbed. People shoved past police barricades and began tearing the family’s possessions apart. We have video of that as it happened. Now, I want to warn our more sensitive viewers, this segment will contain graphic language—”
I tried clicking on another channel, but just as Vincent had feared back in L.A., Downvote has gone viral. Over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow is trying to give her audience the big picture.
“The website known as Downvote has declared open season on everyone. Anyone can be added to the list of names on the site, and if they receive enough votes, they can become the target of massive, organized online mobs. Victims have found their credit ratings hacked, their emails released in public, their addresses revealed, and been bombarded with threats. Some have even experienced actual violence—”
It’s even made Fox News.
“Los Angeles police say a pipe bomb was thrown over the fence of the residence of actor Kyle Slater after he reached number one on Downvote’s Internet hit list. Slater plays the bad-boy senior on the hit Fox show Pathways, but is perhaps best known for his messy public breakup with singer Alana Sweet last month. The Justice Department says it has now opened an investigation into Downvote and is working to track down the owners of the website—”
I shut the TV down and try to think. One question keeps nagging at me: Why? Why is Godwin doing this?
As far as I can tell, he hasn’t demanded any kind of payoff from the people who are named on the site. Stack has been monitoring all of Godwin’s Web traffic, so we should know. He’s not blackmailing any of the celebrities who have been Downvoted. He’s not offering to protect anyone from the online mob he’s created.
It seems like he’s content to simply let it rage, to keep burning, to see how far the fire will spread.
Even though I’ve never read a thought inside his head, this doesn’t seem like the Godwin I know. Godwin is a criminal. He’s a schemer. He’s utterly convinced of his own superiority.
And in everything I’ve learned about him, I’ve yet to see him do anything without some kind of profit.
But this—this is just anarchy. This is just opening the floodgates, like Stack said.
There has to be a motive. There has to be a reason.
I just have to figure out what it is before anyone else gets killed.
Especially me.
*
Reykjavík to Bucharest seems like a short hop compared to the flight from Houston. Just five hours across Europe and we’re at Henri Coandă International Airport. We submit to a cursory inspection by the customs agents. I use my talent to help them overlook the guns. I intercept the visual input when their eyes fall on the familiar metal carrying cases, and then reroute it away from the areas of their brains where it would be recognized. They look right at the weapons, but they don’t see them. They just give us both a brief grimace and hand back our passports. Welcome to Romania. Enjoy your stay.
A bribe probably would have been just as effective, but I hate to waste money.
Then we’re out the doors of the airport and into a waiting Land Rover, arranged by Stack or one of his assistants. I’m on constant alert now, scanning the crowd for anyone taking any interest in us whatsoever. I refuse to be caught off guard again.
We’ve got one advantage over Godwin, at least. We know where he’s been, but he doesn’t know we’re here.
Sara boots up the GPS, but I turn it off just as quickly. She’s still irritable from the hangover and the lack of sleep, so her look says it all.
I take out a map and remind her that GPS can be hacked and tracked. She scowls, but starts the car and begins asking for directions. “I feel like we’re back in the twentieth century,” she growls. “You better know where we’re going.”
I do, actually. I’ve been through here several times before, usually in a CIA-owned plane, usually with a guy in the back wearing a black hood over his head. Romania is home to several black-site prisons—the places where we take the detainees and terrorists that we don’t want on any official records. The Romanians were hard-line Communists in the Cold War, but famine and bone-grinding poverty converted them to capitalism pretty quickly after the Soviet Union collapsed. Despite an average wage of less than a thousand bucks a month, they’re considered one of Europe’s success stories. They take everybody’s money these days.
I’ve got no idea how much the CIA paid in rent for the little building in Bucharest where we took our prisoners. It looked like a DMV and was surrounded by ordinary government offices. But that’s where I did some of my best work with Cantrell, digging secrets out of the minds of terrorists. I hacked into the brains of men who financed sleeper cells, who sold nerve-gas samples to the highest bidder, who beheaded journalists, who convinced mentally disabled kids to strap on suicide vests and run through U.S. and Israeli checkpoints.
Unfortunately, today we’re not dealing with anyone that nice.
Romania is also where Godwin began to really make money, and he did it by working with the Romanian Mafia.
I don’t know the specifics—Cantrell didn’t give me that much detail— but I can see what a great match Godwin and the Romanians made for each other.
According to what I’ve learned from Cantrell, Godwin works mainly with the Boian clan, who specialize in tw
o things: cybercrime and human trafficking.
When it comes to cybercrime, Romania was something of a pioneer in the field. In the days of the Cold War, Romania was home to a lot of mathematicians and computer coders. After the Communists fell, many of those guys found they could make a lot more money in computer crime than in solving equations. Today, Romania has literally the fastest Internet connection speed in Europe, and in some places, the highest download speed in the world. It also has very little oversight and regulation. That’s why it’s known worldwide as a hub for criminal hackers. The hacker who broke into George W. Bush’s private files lived here. If you’ve seen any of Bush’s paintings, you’ve got that guy to thank.
I can see Godwin setting up shop, happy as a pig in shit.
Cybercrime sounds clean and almost painless. It’s ATM skimming, moving money around different accounts to avoid taxes or hide drug profits. It’s Internet scams that steal credit-card numbers or hack into private files for financial information. Sure, you might have to call your bank and get new cards, but nobody really gets hurt, do they?
Except when they do.
Because occasionally, the cybercrime intersects with the Boian clan’s other business: the human-trafficking side of the operation.
And that is definitely brutal.
Okay. I admit it. On all my business trips, I’ve looked at my share of porn. The pay-per-view stuff in the hotels, and the never-ending stream that flows through my laptop from the Net. So I don’t need someone to explain to me what a cam girl is. I am aware there are women of all ages who sit in front of their computers and do things for money. Some of them work together in apartments and shared houses. Some of them go to warehouses that are divided into cubicles, where they change into lingerie or swimsuits like a uniform, do their shift, and then clock out afterward and go back to their real lives. Some of them smile and laugh about it, make their rent, and then move on.
And some of them are penned up like veal, threatened with beatings and rape, and have their earnings stolen out from under them by the people running the shows.
Like the Boian clan. The Romanian Mafia owns a lot of cam warehouses because they are great fronts for laundering money. That’s where Godwin comes in. He converts the earnings from drugs, prostitution, gunrunning—anything on the black market—into the credits used to buy time for the cam girls’ sex shows. Then he cashes those credits back out as profits to the shell corporation that owns the cam-girl site and sends them back to the criminals, minus his fee. The money becomes clean and almost legitimate.
But that requires a lot of cam girls sitting in front of their computers around the clock to make it work. The Mafia brings them in with promises of big, easy paychecks—which means something in a place where so many people are barely surviving. Once they’re inside, they find it’s not that easy to get out.
The Boian clan has a bad reputation. I did some research on the plane ride, and I found out why Godwin would use them. Like the biker gangs he hired back in the States, the Boians are known for a fondness for amphetamines and brutality. Recently they covered the driver of a cigarette truck in gasoline and lit him on fire when he resisted a hijacking. Then Godwin posted a video of the man as he burned to a pirate video site with the title “Got a light?”
Nobody has tried to play hero with the Boian clan since.
That said, I’m not actually that worried about these guys. Godwin uses them to scare people, and yes, they’re willing to break bones and inflict pain.
But once you get past that, you start to see how limited they really are.
Something you have to understand about gangsters: they’re under tremendous amounts of stress. The halfway intelligent ones have realized that they are essentially chronically unemployed and constantly in search of a new job that will, most likely, either put them in jail or kill them. They know they’ve painted themselves into a corner in their lives, but they know there’s no window at their back. So they just keep doing the same thing, hoping that one of these times the big score will land, and they might be able to retire to Mesa, Arizona, or someplace. But since they can count on one hand the number of people they know who have made it past their fortieth birthday, they aren’t really depending on it. They’re aging twice as fast as civilians because of all the pressure, and their attention is always divided.
And the stupid ones, the ones who haven’t figured this out? They’re challenged just navigating all the ordinary obstacles in their lives on a day-to-day basis. That’s why they became criminals in the first place. They couldn’t think of anything better.
This is why I love going up against thugs. They’re easy. Like Vasily’s crew back in L.A. They’re a light workout. It does amazing things for my self-esteem. I mean, I’ve made some stupid mistakes and sometimes wake up filled with regret at my choices. But I can always tell myself, thank God I haven’t sunk this low.
Well, not yet, anyway.
*
We find the warehouse quickly, using the coordinates that Stack snagged from Godwin on the phone call. It’s a squat, cinder-block building on the outskirts of Bucharest, down a stretch of badly paved road at the edge of an industrial district. The economic miracle hasn’t reached this part of town yet: it’s still all gray concrete, eroded by years of neglect.
The street is deserted except for a caveman in a leather jacket who looks almost as solid as the wall he’s leaning against. All it takes is the briefest of scans to know that his primary purpose is not to keep people like us from getting inside.
He is there to keep the women inside from getting out.
I can feel it from my seat in the Land Rover when we park. It’s like a physical weight, a pressure in the air. I can’t make out anything clearly at this distance, but I sense the minds of the people inside, and my teeth immediately clench. I feel constricted. Caged. Trapped.
Sara notices my shift in demeanor immediately. She’s learned to pick up on this, because my mood swings have been a pretty good early-warning system for keeping us alive so far.
“You okay?” she asks.
“No,” I reply. “Do me a favor? Wait here.”
I get out of the Rover without waiting for her reply and start walking toward the slab of meat at the door.
The slab—his name is Andrei—looks only mildly interested. They get visitors here from time to time. He’s not on high alert. He thinks he can handle whatever comes his way.
I figure I will try it the easy way first. I walk right up to him. I have to tilt my neck a little to look him in the eye. He waits for me to speak.
I tell him, in English, “Godwin sent for me.”
Which is true, more or less.
I get the confusion coming off him. It’s not the language he doesn’t understand. He speaks broken English as well as anyone else in Europe. He just doesn’t recognize the name. And then I see why, inside his mind.
They call him Bogdan here. From bog, the Slavic word for “God” and dan, for “given.”
God-given. Somehow that makes me clench my teeth even harder.
“Bogdan,” I correct myself. “I’m here for Bogdan.”
He shrugs.
“Then let me talk to whoever knows where he is,” I say.
He frowns now. The thought and the words are almost simultaneous. He’s bored and irritable. “And who the fuck are you?” he asks.
I’m close enough now to the door to feel some of the minds inside. Several are fogged by an amount of drugs even I find impressive. Others are bored. Others are anxious. Scared. Afraid of what might happen if they do not make their quota for the shift.
Then there are the minds of the men. Three of them, inside—the keepers, they call themselves. Bored, like Andrei the giant here. Bored and getting ugly. One of them has a thought. About that new girl, the one who just started in the last cubicle on the left.
That’s about where I decide I’ve had it.
“You know what?” I say to Andrei, smiling brightly. “Never mind.”
I hit him with the nastiest memory I can summon from my mind. A 40 percent third-degree burn I got from a soldier who’d been trapped in the wreckage of a flaming Humvee in Iraq. He barely survived.
Andrei screams as he feels his flesh blacken and crack, then curls into a ball on the ground.
I pound on the door while he keeps screaming. I sense alarm on the other side, the approach of another one of the keepers. This one’s name is Iancu. He yanks the door open quickly, gun in hand, and sees Andrei writhing on the ground, gapes stupidly for a moment—
And then shrieks himself when his legs fall away under him as I shut down the nerve pathways from his brain to the sacral plexus at the base of his spine.
I am going to regret both of these moves later. But not now. Now, even though I feel the pain and the panic blazing off the two men like bright sunlight, it seems entirely justified.
I reach down and scoop up the gun that Iancu dropped when his legs turned to jelly. I don’t think I’ll need it, but I don’t want to leave it for him.
I march down the entryway. Most of the building is empty space, divided by the same kind of cubicles you see in every open-plan office in the world. There are sheets hung over each one, forming little tents. The only real room is a small, built-out kitchen that has a large picture window to watch the cube farm. Along one wall is a row of server racks, more computing power than this place possibly needs, even with every lonely and horny guy in the world jacking in to watch the shows.
I can hear sounds. Stilted English. Breathy, theatrical moans. Bad Euro-pop from cheap speakers.
In my head, I pick up nothing but the same boredom and fear and anxiety I sensed outside, only worse now. I feel like crawling out of my own skin.
I pass one of the cubes on my way to the kitchen, moving fast. I catch a glimpse of one of the girls. She cannot be more than fifteen in her star-spangled bikini. She looks up at me, her eyes rimmed with enough eyeshadow to look like a raccoon.
Hunt You Down Page 21
