“Answer me, please.”
Her bantering tone evaporated. “There’s someone, I’m certain of it.”
“I was right, then.”
“You’re always right, you know that.”
He frowned. “You’re referring to something, but I don’t know what.”
“Yes, I know. With your powers of perception you’ve blotted it all out. It’s like it never happened.”
He stared at her until she said, “Andy’s very secretive.”
“His life, it seems, is one huge secret.”
“As you said.”
“Who is running him?”
“To be determined.”
“Still.”
She turned to him. “So you want to do this yourself? No? I thought not.” She shook her head. “People are complicated, an affair is complicated.”
“We don’t have time for this, Vera. I need to know—”
“You always need to know. Where is Caroline? Who is Gunn working for behind your back? Where will it stop?”
“It can’t stop, Vera. This is my life.”
“Sadly.” She walked past him into the living room.
“We’re not finished. Come back here.”
When she ignored him, he strode after her.
“Be careful, Vera,” he said.
She seemed incredulous. “You’re worried about my safety? Now?”
His eyes searched hers. He seemed to want to say something, then changed his mind. “You’ll never hear it coming.”
“Who ever does?”
“Who ever does what?” Gunn said. He had a bath sheet wrapped around his middle and was rubbing his hair dry with a matching towel. He looked from Vera’s expression to Carson’s half-shadowed face, and nodded. “You two are at it again.”
“He can’t help himself.” Vera moved aside as Gunn went into the bedroom to dress. She plucked at the puddle of her trench coat. While she was at it, she gave Carson a good view of everything. Hearing him expel a breath, she smiled to herself.
“I’ve showered you with gifts and favors.”
“And what do I have to show for it?”
“What is it you want?”
“A family,” she snapped as she whirled on him. “But all I have is you and Andy.”
“Poor you.”
She bared her teeth as she slid on the trench coat and belted it up.
“Aren’t you going to shower?” Carson said.
“Why should I?” She stepped into her shoes. “I love the smell of sex in the morning.”
She left without turning around or saying another word. It was as if the world she had just inhabited had vanished in a puff of smoke.
By this time, Gunn had dressed himself in midnight blue trousers and a crisp pin-striped shirt. A pair of shiny, expensive loafers were on his feet.
“Jesus, Andrew, she’s young enough to be—”
“Not quite.” Gunn guided an alligator-skin belt through the loops of his trousers and buckled up.
“You’re taking quite a risk.”
“Ah, now we come to the crux of your displeasure.” Gunn went through the living room, into the kitchen, and took a bag of coffee beans out of the freezer.
Carson followed him into the bright lights of the kitchen. “She didn’t even stay long enough to make coffee.”
“And you wonder why she hates your guts.” For the next few minutes he busied himself with grinding the beans, heating the water, then combining them in a Pyrex presspot. He took out a pair of cups from an overhead cabinet.
“I want to kill her.”
Gunn arranged a container of half-and-half and a canister of raw sugar. “No, you don’t. You want what she won’t give you.”
Carson reached out and swung Gunn around. “Listen, you, it’s fucking dangerous to go exploring in here.” He tapped the end of a forefinger against his temple. “More dangerous than you can imagine.”
For a long moment, the two men stared at each other. Then, without a word, Gunn turned back to the coffee and depressed the plunger all the way to the bottom.
“Cream and sugar,” Carson said.
Gunn stared down at the two empty cups. “You don’t have to tell me a second time.”
* * *
“THERE’S NOTHING here,” McKinsey said.
Naomi wrinkled her nose. “Nothing but the ammonia stink of an industrial-strength cleaner.”
“The manager of First Won Ton upstairs said they had a vermin problem.”
Naomi, playing the beam of her flashlight over the bare concrete floor and walls, said, “I heard him, Pete.”
“But you don’t believe him.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
His own beam swung back and forth. “Maybe McClure was mistaken.”
Naomi glanced at him. “Are you kidding me? Mistaken about a white slave trade clearinghouse, mistaken about the body of Arjeta Kraja?”
“Do you see any evidence of those things?” McKinsey squinted. “He said he was calling from where?”
“He didn’t say.” Naomi walked into the back room, which was no bigger than a good-sized closet. “He was with Dennis Paull and Alli.”
“GPS?”
“He disabled it on his cell and his signal is being bounced, so he can’t be traced. But he must have been on the move because the signal kept cutting out.” She was staring at the painting of blue and gray mountains, whose ragged tops seemed to shred the blue sky. “What the hell is this doing here?” She glanced around. “No other paintings, wall hangings, calendars, zippo. But Jack said there was another room with Arjeta Kraja laid out in it, dead as a doorpost.”
“I don’t see anything of the sort,” McKinsey said. “Ever occur to you he was full of shit?”
When she gave him a dirty look, he added, “Between the two of you, Alli Carson could be a serial killer and she’d never get arrested.”
“Don’t be a dick.” She went over to the painting and felt behind it. “There’s something here.”
McKinsey came over and unhooked the painting, setting it down. They both stared at the one-way glass, then, cupping their hands, tried to peer into the other side.
“What the fuck?” McKinsey said.
Naomi flipped the wall switch, but nothing happened. “Go get the manager,” she said.
While he was gone, she checked around the tiny room, trying to find a way into the space beyond the one-way glass. She found nothing, which puzzled her so much that it was the first question to put to the restaurant manager.
He was a slender Chinese man in his midfifties, with a flat face and eyes that darted about like a pair of frightened mice. He licked his lips continually and his clasped hands made washing motions.
“I don’t know,” he said nervously. He frowned, clearly puzzled. “I didn’t even know the room existed.”
“But you own this space,” she said.
He nodded. “But it’s not used by the restaurant. I rent it out.” He looked around. “At least I did.”
“Who rented it?” McKinsey said.
“A company. Qershi Holdings.”
“Who the hell’re they?”
The manager spread his hands. “I have no idea.”
“Who is Qershi Holdings’ representative?”
“I only dealt with a voice over the phone.”
“And that was enough for you?” Naomi said skeptically.
“He sent cash over as a binder. Two months’ worth.” The manager shrugged his negligible shoulders. “Before that, this space just gathered dust. Though I advertised heavily, I couldn’t give it away. In my business when cash speaks, I listen.”
McKinsey looked around the space. “So what was going on down here?”
The manager shrugged.
McKinsey stared at him. “You’re a real font of knowledge, aren’t you?”
“You never got curious?” Naomi said.
“I was paid a lot of money not to be curious. A stipulation from my tenant.”
Naomi tapped a pen against the side of her smartphone. “So, basically, they could have been auctioning off little girls down here and you wouldn’t know about it.”
The manager gave no indication that he knew anything.
“We came down here through the restaurant,” McKinsey said.
“There’s a back entrance,” the manager replied. “I was told to keep the lights off in that area.”
“So where is everyone?” Naomi said.
“They must have moved out late last night. I was here until closing—around midnight—and I didn’t see anything.”
“Of course you didn’t,” McKinsey muttered.
The manager leaned forward. “Pardon?”
“How do we get into this space behind the glass?” Naomi said.
“Like I said—”
A little yelp exploded from the manager’s mouth when McKinsey smashed the glass with his elbow, then began to pick out the remaining shards from the frame. Naomi trained her flashlight on the interior. It was a perfect square, small, airless. A faint but unmistakable sickly sweet scent came to her.
“It smells like death in there,” she said.
The manager whimpered. He held up his hands. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Too late for that,” McKinsey said as he watched Naomi carefully climb through the shattered window. “What have we got?” he asked her.
“A whole lot of nothing.” The beam of her flashlight lit up the corners of the space. “Odd, though, the floor in here is wooden planks.”
“An older part of the subbasement,” McKinsey offered.
“Right.” Then the beam came to rest. “Hold on a minute.” Crouched down, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves.
McKinsey leaned in. “Whatcha got?”
“One of these boards has something on it.” She played the beam directly on it. “I think it’s blood, Pete.”
Lifting an adjacent board, she played the beam of light into the space beneath. She bent her head down for a better look, and coughed heavily. “Fresh blood.”
FOURTEEN
THE SWORD hung in the sky, glittering, remote. It revealed itself through a rent in the thick cloud cover, a sword full of blue-white stars. Jack took a deep breath of the humid air. It was filled with strange scents, just as the night was filled with strange sounds.
Behind him, the jet crouched, having landed on a runway Jack had no doubt was not on any map or near any inhabited area. It was silent, dark. Just beyond was the verge of a thick evergreen forest, its canopy, like groping fingers, mimicking the rough-hewn tors of the Korab mountain range that rose ahead of them. Somewhere up there was Tetovo, impregnable, teeming with Xhafa’s men, bristling with high-tech weaponry.
They were in western Macedonia, behind enemy lines. Their world had contracted into a red zone, a potential killing field. It was essential, Paull had told them just before landing, that they keep this in mind every minute of the day and night until such time as they made it back here and the plane took off.
While Paull broke out their weaponry and outerwear for the trek, Jack took Alli aside.
“I really need you to keep an eye on the kid.”
She looked at him with her clear eyes. “You don’t think I killed Billy, do you?”
“Don’t be absurd.” He took a breath. “But what I can’t figure out is why you lied about Arjeta Kraja. You obviously did know her.”
“Billy introduced her to me.”
“Did you think you were protecting her?”
“After they showed me what had happened to Billy I knew her life was in danger. I thought if no one knew about her involvement then maybe she had a chance to stay alive, but if all of a sudden cops and Feds came after her I knew she wouldn’t survive the next twenty-four hours.”
“So you knew about Dardan.”
She shook her head. “Neither Billy nor Arjeta mentioned him or the sex slave auction. I had no idea about that place.”
“Why would your uncle have a take-out menu from First Won Ton? And why was spicy fragrant duck with cherries circled in pencil? Cherries. It’s possible he knew about the Stem.”
“Honestly, I don’t know what to think.”
“You know him better than I do, better than almost anyone.”
“Actually, no.” Alli looked pained. “My parents would take me to his house, but he rarely spoke to me. I got the impression he didn’t like kids, including his own daughter.”
“He had a daughter?”
“Caroline.” Alli’s eyes lost focus as she allowed memories to surface. “Caro was a strange girl.”
“Strange how?”
For a moment, Alli seemed lost in thought. “For one thing, she wasn’t interested in normal sorts of things—you know, music, movies, talking on the phone, clothes shopping, boys.”
“So what was she into?”
Alli shrugged. “Who knows. Secrets?”
“Secrets?”
“Yeah, she was always disappearing—no one knew where she went, not Uncle Hank or her mom, Heidi. It would drive them crazy, especially Uncle Hank, who likes everything done his way. I’m guessing that’s why Heidi left.”
Jack considered for a moment. “Do you have any idea what happened to Caroline?”
“No. It was like she disappeared off the face of the earth. One night she walked out of the house and never came back.”
“How old was she?”
Alli bit her lip. “Thirteen, maybe. That was nine, ten years ago.”
“So she’d be twenty-two, twenty-three now. And nothing since then?”
Alli shook her head. “She could be alive or dead, no one knows.”
“Someone must know,” Jack said.
“Do you think her disappearance is relevant to Billy’s murder?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But I keep coming back to that take-out menu you found in your uncle’s study.”
“It seems both irrelevant and somehow important. I mean, he wouldn’t be caught dead eating Chinese take-out.”
“Which is why it’s sticking in my mind,” Jack said. “Anomalies are always important.”
Alli stared at him for a minute. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m wondering if there’s a link between the Stem, that take-out menu, and Caroline.”
“You think Caro was kidnapped and auctioned off?”
“I’m wondering if that’s the direction your uncle is going in.”
“But if he knows about what was going on at the Stem, why didn’t he have it shut down?”
“That’s an interesting question,” Jack said.
Alli dug in her pocket. “Maybe this will be of some help.” She handed over the cell phone. “I also found this in Uncle Hank’s study.”
Jack was about to open it when Paull came up to them.
“Okay, we’re all set. You need to get into your mountain gear.”
Jack pocketed the cell as he took a look at the forbidding mountains. “How are we getting up to Tetovo?”
Paull drew out a map covered in clear waterproof plastic and opened it. He clicked a pen flash and pointed. “This is the best route, according to our geotech boys.”
Jack nodded. He didn’t bother studying the map because he wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. “What about the kid?”
Paull’s eyes were dark and hooded. “We can’t trust him to go any farther.”
“You can’t just cut him loose out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“He stays with the plane until we get back,” Paull said curtly.
“That would be a mistake.”
They all turned to see Thatë standing behind Paull.
“Get back,” Paull flared.
Alli held up a hand. “Hold on a minute, you two.”
Paull’s head swiveled around and he glared at her. “Listen, missy, Jack may cut you an unreasonable amount of slack, but as far as decisions here are concerned—”
“Thatë’s been here bef
ore,” she said. “He knows the mountains, he knows this area of Macedonia.”
Jack turned to the kid. “Is that true?”
Thatë nodded. “I lived in the mountains for eighteen months before I came to Washington.”
Jack beckoned him with a finger and the kid joined their circle.
“Show him the route we’re taking, Dennis.”
When Paull made no move, Alli traced the route on the map.
Thatë shook his head. “There are at least two good reasons why this route will get you into trouble. The first is here.” His forefinger stabbed out. “This village, Dolna Zhelino, belongs to Xhafa. If we go anywhere near it, he’ll know within an hour that you’re coming.”
Paull rolled his eyes.
Jack said, “What else?”
“The route takes you along this ridge above the Vardar River.” His fingertip traced a line. “Here.”
“It’s the most direct route,” Paull said. “Otherwise, we’ll waste time going miles out of our way.”
“It will be a waste of time,” Thatë said, “once you’re buried in a rockslide.”
Paull made a noise in the back of his throat. “Alli, take the kid back inside the plane.”
When the two had mounted the folding stairs and vanished into the jet’s interior, Jack said, “What’s your problem, Dennis?”
“My problem is this kid.”
“Really? He’s already proven useful.”
“Why the fuck should I believe anything he says?” Paull’s eyes engaged Jack’s. They had dark circles under them. Lines of tension scored his face. “My sense is he’s working for Xhafa, and if he is, he’ll lead us right into a mortal trap.”
“What if he’s telling the truth?”
“Jack, he has no incentive to tell the truth and every reason to make sure we wind up dead.”
* * *
INSIDE THE plane, Alli sat down in the seat nearest the door. After a moment’s hesitation, Thatë sat beside her.
“Dennis Paull.” She shook her head. “What a dickwad.”
He laughed. “You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”
“Shit,” she said. “I’m afraid of everything.”
“You’re lying.”
She laughed softly, mocking him.
“Then you hide your terror well.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice, believe me.” As if realizing she had possibly revealed too much, she launched into another topic before he could respond. “What were you doing up in the Tetovo area?”
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