by Greg Rucka
I closed on the building from the west rather than straight on and, when I reached the side of the house, crouched and opened the toolbox. The two antennae screwed easily and quickly into place. I double-checked that I was on power, then hit the Big Red Button, and there was no noise, and for a moment I wondered if anything was happening at all. I put my hand on the side of the case; heat was beginning to radiate through the metal.
When I checked the BlackBerry, I saw that I had no signal.
God bless and keep the engineers, I thought.
I went to the cars next, opened up my knife. I punctured all four tires on the vehicles. The Town Car, hidden in the garage, I'd have to take care of on the way out.
I headed to the front door. The double doors weren't going to yield to anything my Glock could do, I knew, but that had never been my plan of ingress. Two curtained bay windows flanked the entrance at either side, and either one of them would do quite nicely. Since my plan was to surprise the hell out of them, and since making a lot of noise would aid that, the windows were going to be my primary entry. Ideally, the crashing glass would throw them into a panic, and naturally enough, they'd then try to raise their pet police. Once inside, I'd rely on my speed and their confusion, and hopefully the combination would do the trick.
With my windbreaker wrapped around my arm, my left hand up to shield my face, I shattered the left window, three vicious blows with the tire iron that brought the sheet crashing down in pieces that rang and burst all around me. I dropped the bar, swept the glass away from the frame with my protected arm, then pushed the curtain back and vaulted up and over, into the entry hall, drawing the Glock.
Mike was the first one to respond. He came out of the hallway to my left, bleary-eyed, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. I'd counted on the bleariness; it was why I'd picked the hour. Nonetheless, he'd had the presence of mind to arm himself, a solid, traditional Remington pump-action shotgun, police model, in his hands, and I wondered if he and Bradley were also cops.
He saw me and he saw my gun, but, in relative terms, I had all the time in the world and he had none. I picked my shot, gave him the same one I'd given Vladek Karataev back in Batumi so many weeks ago, shattering his pelvis with a round and stealing his legs. He dropped face-first, his momentum carrying him forward on the marble floor, smearing blood.
“Bella!” he screamed.
I closed on him in two steps and then turned the third into a kick to the face. I kicked him hard, and he lost teeth. He also lost consciousness.
I started up the stairs, shouting in Georgian.
“Tiasa! It's David! David Mercer! Where are you?”
A door opened on the second floor, I couldn't see where, but I could hear it, then heard another one slam closed. Someone was running down a hallway, away from me. I kept moving, shouting Tiasa's name, racing up the steps. The hallway ran left and right, and I heard noise to the left, went that way first, stopping at the nearest door. I took the entry hard, kicking it open, the Glock ready in both hands. The room was empty. I pivoted, moved to the next one, this across the hall, a meter down, kicked it free the same way.
The door hit Bradley in the face, where he'd been about to open it, sent him staggering back. He had a pistol in his hand, but no shot, and I put one from the Glock in his knee before he could acquire one. He screamed and dropped.
That's when I saw he was naked, and that the girl in the bed was the same small blonde I'd seen while surveilling the house through my camera's lens.
God, I wanted to kill him.
I wanted to kill him all the more when he begged me not to.
He'd dropped his pistol, a Sig, the same model that I'd found in Bridgett's apartment. I kicked it away, and he clutched his knee with both hands, looking up at me.
“God don't please don't,” he sobbed. “Please don't!”
The girl in the bed was staring at me, sheet pulled around her frail body. Her expression was blank, no trace of horror or pain or anger, nothing at all.
I kicked him in his wounded knee, and he screamed and flailed back, and I kicked him again, this time in the groin, then in the stomach, and then, finally, in the face. He lay bleeding on the navy blue carpet, skin torn, semiconscious. I stepped over him, grabbed the Sig from where it had fallen on the floor.
“The only reason you get to live,” I said, “is because I want you to suffer.”
Then I used the Sig as a hammer and hit him in the back of the head with it. The crack it made as metal met bone was nearly satisfying.
Tucking the Sig away at the small of my back, I asked the girl, “English?”
She nodded, slightly, staring at Bradley on the floor.
“People are going to come here,” I told her. “Good people. By morning.”
Her expression didn't change, and she nodded again, as small an acknowledgment as before.
“Tiasa,” I said. “Which way?”
She pointed, indicating the right-hand hallway, the direction opposite the way I'd headed off the stairs.
“Good people will come,” I promised her, and stepped back into the hall.
The house seemed to have gone silent, remained that way as I retraced my steps. Glancing down to the bottom of the stairs, Mike lay just as before. I moved into the new hallway.
“Tiasa! It's David!”
From behind one of the closed doors on the hall, I heard a rustle, a thump. I made for the sound, but this time took the entry softer, putting my body against the wall and reaching over for the handle. It turned without resistance, and then the shots came, piling one atop another, wild fire, until five holes punched through the wood, each round planting itself in the wall opposite me.
In the silence that followed, I heard someone whimper.
I pushed the door open and stepped around, raising the Glock.
Bella Downs stood in the bedroom. She was dressed in dark purple silk pajamas, a revolver in one hand and her cell phone in the other. The gun had been pointed at the door, but when she saw me she started to move it, to point it at the head of the girl huddling in the corner.
“Go away,” Bella shouted at me. “Go away!”
“You stop!” I shouted back. “You point that at her and I will shoot you dead!”
The gun froze midway in its travel. Then her hand opened and it fell to the floor. I stepped in enough to catch it with my toe, pull it away from her, then went down far enough to scoop it up in my left hand. I pulled the release, swung out the cylinder. The revolver had carried only five shots. She'd used them all on the door.
“Take her,” Bella Downs told me. “Just take her and go away and never come back.”
“That's pretty much my plan,” I said.
Then I hit her hard, across the face, with her revolver, shattering her jaw. She dropped, trying to scream, then discovered that made the pain worse. Blood gushed from her nose and mouth.
“Tiasa,” I said, switching back to Georgian. “It's David, David Mercer. Yeva's husband. I'm taking you away from here.”
The girl in the corner didn't rise, instead trying to make herself smaller. Bella Downs, on the floor, made sobbing sounds.
I tucked the Glock away, then knelt down, putting the revolver on the floor between me and the girl.
“Tiasa,” I said. “It's me. We're leaving now. Let's go.”
She raised her head slowly, afraid of being betrayed again, lied to again, used again. But when her eyes found mine, there was no relief in them, no joy on her face, no recovery to be found at all.
“Let's go,” I said again.
In silence, she got to her feet, and I put a hand on her shoulder. I expected a physical response to that, a tensing of muscle, a pulling away from my grip, but neither came, and she let me guide her from the room, then down the hall, then to the stairs past Mike, still lying and bleeding on the white marble floor. We went out the front, to the Jetta, and I put her inside.
Tiasa never made a sound. Tiasa never said a word.
And Tias
a never looked back.
CHAPTER
Thirty-five
The first hints of the story were beginning to break when we stopped in Salt Lake City midmorning, after almost five hours of driving. In the motel room, while Tiasa bathed and changed into the new clothes I'd bought her, I snapped on the news, bouncing up the dial to first CNN, then MSNBC. The only item I found was on the latter.
“Acting on anonymous information, federal authorities raided a house in New Paradise, Nevada, this morning, as part of an ongoing investigation into human trafficking More on this as it develops.”
That was it. That was all.
I turned the television off and the BlackBerry on, called Alena.
“You have her?” she asked.
“I have her.”
“How is she?”
“She hasn't said much. She hasn't really said anything.”
“May I speak with her?”
“Hold on.”
I moved to the bathroom door, tapped lightly on it. The water had stopped running over ten minutes ago.
“Tiasa,” I said.
She opened the door, wet black hair and jeans and a dark green T-shirt. She didn't look at me; she hadn't much looked at me, at least when she thought I was looking at her, since I'd put her in the Jetta back in New Paradise and started driving.
“Yeva wants to talk to you,” I said, and handed her the phone, then moved away, giving them privacy. For almost two minutes Tiasa said nothing, listening.
Then, her voice hoarse, she said, “I understand.”
She brought the phone back to me, then sat on the other bed in the room and began to put on her new sneakers. I put the phone to my ear.
“I'll contact you when we get to New York,” I said. “Ask Bridgett to call her sister, let her know we're coming.”
“Don't rush,” Alena told me, switching to English. “It would be stupid to die now because you were speeding.”
“I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you, too.”
In the background, I heard Bridgett make a gagging noise.
We were back in the Jetta and heading north, into Wyoming, before afternoon. Mostly, Tiasa slept, or appeared to. We stopped in Cheyenne to eat, and she didn't have much of an appetite. After dinner, we got back on the road, following Interstate 80 into Nebraska. Again, Tiasa seemed to sleep, or to try to. Sometimes, I thought she was talking to herself, her voice so soft I wasn't sure I was hearing it at all. I didn't know what to tell her, what to say, and so I drove and told myself that she would talk to me when she was ready, when she had something she wanted to say.
We were some eighty miles west of Omaha, past one in the morning, and I was thinking we were going to need to stop soon, when she finally did. The car was dark, the only lights from the instrument panel, the occasional splash from headlights passing us in either direction. The farmland spread out forever on all sides.
“Yeva,” Tiasa began, then stopped. She was speaking softly, in Georgian, and I almost lost her voice amidst the engine and road noise. She coughed, cleared her throat. “Yeva told me that she was raped.”
“Yes,” I said. “When she was young, younger than you.”
“Oh,” Tiasa said, and then lapsed back into silence.
We stopped for the rest of the night in Omaha. Tiasa went to take another shower before sleeping, and again, I turned to the television for an update. Since MSNBC had done well by me the last time, I went with them again.
The story had expanded. Six girls, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, had been rescued in the raid on the house in New Paradise. Footage showed them being led from the building as men and women in FBI jackets fluttered around them. Authorities had three people in custody, one found at the house, the remaining two arrested at the local hospital. They were said to be cooperating. Authorities were also, apparently, searching for a fourth individual, who they stressed was not a suspect, but rather a person of interest. There was no mention of any part the New Paradise PD might have played in the business.
I turned the television off, removed my glasses, rubbed my eyes. My side ached, and my arm. From the bathroom, I could hear the shower still running. The sound of Tiasa trying to wash away shame and humiliation and pain.
She was in there a very long time.
A day and a half later, outside of Cleveland, making our last push toward New York, Tiasa spoke again.
“What am I going to do, David?” she asked.
I thought of the many ways to answer that, all the things the question could mean. Finally, I said, “You're going to be a dancer, Tiasa.”
“No,” she said. “No, I mean… I mean…”
She faded into silence again. I glanced over at her. She had her head leaning against the window, staring at the dashboard. She was biting her lower lip, hard, one hand wrapped around the handle of the door, the other in a fist, pressed into her thigh.
“I don't know what you're feeling,” I said, after another couple of miles. “I can imagine it, but I don't know, not really. But I've lost people I love, Tiasa, had them taken from me, and there have been times when I didn't want to go on without them. And it's hard, and it is going to be hard for you for a long time. But you will survive this. You will survive this, and someday it won't hurt quite so much, and one day you'll smile again. One day you'll laugh again.
“And then you'll want to dance again.”
Her voice was thick. “Yeva told me to be strong. That she knew I was strong.”
“Yeva knows what she's talking about. Yeva's stronger than I'll ever be.” I took another glance at her, saw that she was as before, but had shut her eyes. I looked back to the road. “Yeva's going to have a baby.”
“Yeva is?” Tiasa asked, slowly.
I nodded.
“You're going to have a baby?”
“Yeah.”
She thought about that.
“I hope you have a boy,” Tiasa said.
The New York Times had the full story on the front page the next morning, below the fold, listed as part one of a series. The article seemed to work extensively from the material I had sent anonymously to the paper, supplementing it with information from the State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons report. It began with a description of the house in New Paradise, what it had been used for, the people who had maintained and managed the location.
Then it went on to talk about the girls who had been held there, where they were from, and how they had come to the United States, to the Land of Opportunity. It described the supply chain, how a girl in Ukraine would be sold to a man in Turkey; how that man in Turkey would offer that girl for sale; how, upon receiving payment for her, a “coyote,” or middleman, in Amsterdam would bring her to the U.S.
The article pointed out that, according to the International Labor Organization of the United Nations, 12.7 million people were, at this moment, bound in one form of slavery or another around the world. Either in forced or bonded labor, or in sexual servitude. The majority of these slaves were women and children.
Some NGOs, the article stated, claimed the ILO estimate was exaggerated, that the number was closer to 4 million slaves. As if that made it better.
The piece concluded by saying that other organizations put the estimate as high as 27 million.
Three days after leaving New Paradise, Tiasa and I met Sister Cashel Logan in a park on the southeast edge of the Bronx, a place called the Half Moon Overlook in the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood. It was the last Wednesday of July, hot and humid, and the sun was bright off the water where the Hudson and Harlem rivers met.
She was already waiting for us when we arrived, sitting on a bench near the wrought-iron fence marking the border of the park, and when she saw us coming, she rose to her feet, smiling. She was wearing a cream-colored blouse and black pants, and as ever, the pin of her holy order was in place on her lapel.
“Hello, Tiasa,” Sister Cashel said in practiced and poorly accented Georgian. “My name is Sis
ter Cashel.”
Tiasa, walking at my side and not touching me, stopped, so I stopped with her. Cashel's presence wasn't a surprise; I'd told her who we were meeting and why, and Tiasa had nodded and kept her silence. Now, it seemed, the silence wasn't going to be enough.
“I have English,” she told Cashel, in an accent as bad as Cashel's had been in Georgian.
“Atticus told you about me?” Cashel hadn't moved, still smiling, still calm and reassuring.
Tiasa's brow creased, trying to translate, and after a second, I did it for her, adding, “She calls me Atticus.”
“Why?”
I debated, then said, “It's my name.”
“Your name is David.”
“David was my name in Kobuleti.”
“I don't understand.”
“It's all right. It's complicated. I promise I'll tell you about it sometime.”
Tiasa looked at me, then to Cashel. “Yes, he tells me.”
“I think I can help you,” Cashel said. “I want to help you.”
“Yes. He says this.”
“Do you want my help?”
Tiasa nodded, just barely.
“I'm glad,” Cashel said. “I'd like it if you would stay with me for a little while. I'd like you to meet some people, maybe have a chance to make some new friends. Some of them are your age. Some of them have been through bad times, the way you have. They might understand some of what you're feeling.”
Tiasa looked confused, and again I translated.
“How long?” Tiasa asked me. “How long will I stay with her?”
“Only as long as you want,” I said.
“I don't want to. I want to stay with you. I want to see Yeva.”
“Yeva and I can't give you what you need right now, Tiasa. Sister Cashel can.”
“I don't want you to leave.”
“I'm going to come back,” I said.
“What if you don't?” The question came quickly, as if she had been waiting to ask it, as if desperate to be let out. “You can't promise, you don't know what will happen. What if you don't come back? If you go away and you never come back? If you go away, like Papa and Mama and Koba?”
