Blood Trust jm-3

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “I can’t let that happen.”

  “Where is she, Nona? Where is Naomi Wilde?”

  “Fuck if I know.” She made her voice into a hoarse rasp. “But wherever she is, she’s sleeping with the fishes, just like Luca Brasi. And like a Corleone I’m going to track down whoever murdered her and get my revenge.”

  Fraine turned back and leaned forward with his elbows on his desk. “Revenge is a mighty disturbing word coming from a law enforcement officer.”

  Heroe rose. She was like a Valkyrie—fierce, dark, determined. “Yeah, well, murdering a Secret Service agent is a mighty disturbing business.”

  * * *

  “WHAT DID she say just before she died?”

  Arian Xhafa turned, but the Syrian appeared quite serious.

  “She said, ‘Why?’”

  The Syrian’s eyes went briefly out of focus. They were like pits, merciless and brutal. “That’s what they all say. You’d think someone would be more creative.”

  Perhaps you will be, when you die, Xhafa thought.

  “Arjeta Kraja possessed knowledge, Xhafa, and knowledge is like a virus—it can so easily spread exponentially.” The Syrian raked his fingers through his beard, a sign that he was lost in thought. “Did she say anything else?”

  “Yes.” Xhafa shivered. He had hoped the Syrian wouldn’t ask. “She said, ‘Where I’m going, there are no more secrets.’”

  The Syrian started as if he’d been stuck with a hypodermic. “I knew the moment she ran,” he said, “and now here’s the proof of it. You see, you fool. She did know.”

  Once again Xhafa felt like a child being reprimanded for his ignorance. Suddenly, he was possessed by a murderous rage, and he spent the next thirty seconds consciously uncurling his fingers, keeping them from becoming fists. Ever since the Syrian had brought up Arjeta Kraja, Xhafa had felt a cold lump forming in the pit of his stomach. The orphan student body at the Tetovo school was larded with girls—recruits to slavery his agents had stolen or bought from their desperate or unscrupulous families. One of those was Arjeta’s sister, Edon. Did she know what her sister knew, had her sister spoken to her before Xhafa had had a chance to silence Arjeta? He didn’t know. Come to that, he didn’t know whether Edon Kraja had survived the attack on the school. He prayed to Allah that she hadn’t. In either case, he dared not say a word about Edon to the Syrian. If he did, he knew it would be the end for him.

  Oblivious to Xhafa’s mounting tension, the Syrian gazed out the smoked window, deeply immersed in his own thoughts. The caravan pulled into a huge estate, passed through an electronically controlled gate in a high fence topped with rolls of electrified razor wire, and now rolled along a drive of crushed marble so white that even in the gloom it sparkled. Men holding huge attack dogs on leashes appeared on either side of the house. The dogs strained at their leashes, their eyes golden and greedy.

  The Syrian ignored them. “She saw and she must have heard someone mention the name.”

  “But who would mention the name?” Xhafa said.

  The armored vehicle came to rest precisely in front of an immense oak door, snatched from a looted medieval cathedral, that rose, as if on a plinth, at the top of six wide white stone steps.

  The two men emerged from the vehicle. The attack dogs’ flanks quivered but they remained stationary; the scents of the two men were known to them.

  The door was opened by Taroq, the compound’s chief guard. They exchanged greetings as he ushered them into a space as large as a football field and as spare as a monk’s cell. There was no furniture to speak of, only a number of silk prayer rugs, large cushions, and one low wooden table on which sat a tall teapot with a long S-shaped spout, six small glasses in brass frames, and an antique hookah. The two men removed their shoes on the doorstep and stepped into soft leather slippers with turned-up toes.

  Light flooded the space from a series of windows on either side wall. Against the rear wall, a good distance away, was a simple desk and chair. On the desk were three computers—two desktops and a powerful but thin laptop. All were hooked into a high-speed modem with which the house had been specially provided, according to the specifications of the person sitting at the desk, peering from one screen to another.

  “Hello, boys,” the figure said in a darkly sweet contralto. She spoke in English. “Back already?”

  The chair swiveled around as the whisper of the men’s slippers approached. A young woman sat in the chair. She was thin as a reed with a pale, ascetic face whose main feature was a broad, high forehead. Her blond hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail that came to rest between her knife-thin shoulder blades. She wore a pair of black jeans and a man-tailored shirt of the same color with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, revealing silken hair that was almost white. She wore no makeup or jewelry, but her deep-set emerald eyes glittered with a fierce and almost feral intelligence.

  Then she stood and came toward them in long, athletic strides. She was tall, but not nearly as tall as the Syrian. She had to arch upward, standing on tiptoe, to kiss him on the lips, a long, lingering kiss whose naked passion forced Xhafa to look away.

  The Syrian’s face broke into a smile of what might, for him, be termed bliss.

  “Caroline, my habibi,” he said. “What terrible mischief have you been up to while I’ve been absent?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  THREE SIGNIFICANT things happened in the aftermath of the destruction of Arian Xhafa’s stronghold in Tetovo. First, Alli discovered that not all the students were orphans. Most of the young girls, in fact, either had been kidnapped or sold into slavery. Second, there was cell phone service in the area. As Jack’s cell buzzed to life, locking onto the signal, he saw Paull listening intently as Alli spoke with the children’s spokesperson, a beautiful girl with the most perfect skin he’d ever seen, whom Alli seemed to have bonded with immediately.

  There were three messages from Naomi Wilde. Figuring that she had been trying to get in touch with him in order to update him on her progress, he listened with a sense of both shock and mounting alarm to the brief but succinct reports on her theories.

  In the first, she spoke of her mounting suspicions concerning her partner, Peter McKinsey, and his possible connection with Fortress Securities. She also told him about the conflicting evidence against Alli, as if two opposing forces were at work countering each other, an occurrence that, frankly, had her baffled.

  In the second message, she described her tailing McKinsey into Georgetown and the marina there along the Sequoia boardwalk. McKinsey had met an unknown man who, by Naomi’s detailed description, seemed most certainly an Arab of some sort. The Arab had driven McKinsey out to Theodore Roosevelt Island, where they had disembarked and vanished into the foliage. Naomi didn’t say how long they were on the island. Possibly, she hadn’t stuck around to find out.

  The third and final message was a total bombshell that rattled Jack to his core. Naomi detailed her meeting with a woman who had taken her out to Roosevelt Island. There, the woman had shown Naomi the newly buried corpse of Arjeta Kraja. The implication was that the two men had buried her. Had the Arab killed her or had McKinsey? Impossible to tell. Naomi said the woman had mentioned Arjeta’s sisters, Edon and Liridona, both of whom, it appeared, she knew, and who seemed somehow important. The sisters knew a secret, most probably concerning Arian Xhafa or his network. The woman said the Krajas lived in the Albanian coastal city of Vlorë. Liridona was presumably still there, but Edon had run away, probably from Xhafa’s men.

  Possibly to better allow him to absorb her news, Naomi left the identity of her mysterious benefactor until the end, but when Jack heard Annika’s name his blood ran cold. He sat down on a tree stump. His heart was racing; he felt icy hot, a sensation that threatened to annihilate his thought processes.

  Annika had resurfaced, and, of all places, in Washington. Then he heard Naomi in her last line: “I think she’s behind everything, and she knows where you are.”

  Jack, realizing tha
t he’d been holding his breath, struggled to get oxygen into his lungs. He felt as if he were trapped underwater. He tried to calm himself, to figure out what the hell was going on, but it was as if his brain had shut down. Annika, the rogue Russian FSB agent whose life he had saved, only to find out that she was not FSB and the man he thought he’d saved her from was a confederate of hers. She had been working for her grandfather, Dyadya Gourdjiev, all along. He’d accepted that because for a brief time, at least, he and Gourdjiev were on the same side. He’d been powerfully attracted to Annika from the moment they’d first met in the bar of his Moscow hotel last year. And that attraction had turned into a love he’d believed was mutual until on his last day in Moscow he’d received an e-mail from her telling him that she had killed Senator Berns, a murder that had created a political firestorm and had been the starting point of Jack’s investigation into political corruption at the highest level in both the American and the Russian governments.

  I neither regret what I did nor feel pride in it, she had written. In peace as in war sacrifices must be made, soldiers must fall in order for battles to be won—even, or perhaps especially, those that are waged sub rosa, in the shadows of a daylight only people like us notice.

  So you hate me now, which is understandable and inevitable, but you know me, what I can’t stand is indifference, and now, no matter what, you’ll never be indifferent to me.

  God damn her, he thought now. He put his head in his hands. Over the intervening months he had tried to put her out of his mind.

  My grandfather warned me not to tell you, but I’m breaking protocol because there’s something you have to know; it’s the reason I haven’t come, why I won’t come no matter how long you wait, why I’m not being melodramatic when I say that we must never see each other again.

  Her involvement all but paralyzed him. It threw the entire scenario into another arena entirely, and all at once, pieces, tiny and disparate, began to fall into place. Another murder that set an entire group of people into motion, most notably him—and Alli. Could this be another elaborately staged setup choreographed by Annika? It had her hallmarks, certainly, but there were marked differences, not the least of which was the brutal torture of Billy Warren. That wasn’t Annika at all. Her rage at her father had exploded quickly and definitively. Annika had been the victim of physical abuse; there was no circumstance under which Jack could imagine her torturing someone, unless the person had done grievous bodily harm to her or to someone she loved. This was not Billy Warren’s profile.

  All at once, he became aware that Paull had broken away from Alli and the girl, and was standing beside him.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Fine,” Jack muttered.

  “You look as if someone just walked over your grave.”

  All Jack could manage was a wan smile.

  Paull cleared his throat. “Listen, I’m useless here,” he said. “If I’m being perfectly honest with myself, worse than useless. I almost got us all killed.”

  “Could have happened to anyone,” Jack said.

  Paull smiled and clapped Jack on the shoulder. “You’re a good friend. I appreciate the support, but you’ll have to continue on without me.” His eyes cut away for a moment. “The truth is my field days are behind me. I’ve lost the feel. Wet work takes a different kind of person than I’ve become. My years behind a desk have changed me, Jack. Like it or not, my expertise is now in lending my people tactical support and protecting the missions against political meddling. Believe me when I tell you that I can be of more help to you in D.C.”

  Jack nodded. It was difficult to argue against his friend’s assessment.

  Paull indicated the girl with the porcelain skin. “I think you’d best take a listen to what Edon has to say.”

  Instantly, Jack pricked up his ears. “What did you say her name was?”

  “Edon.” Paull looked perplexed. “Edon Kraja.”

  * * *

  THE BEST way to lead a man unwittingly to his death is with a beautiful girl. This was a motto Gunn had lived by during the time he’d toiled in the spook shadows. It was a method old as time, but that was what made it virtually infallible. Occasionally, he’d had to substitute a beautiful boy for a beautiful girl, but the mechanism remained the same.

  Vera Bard was still a day away from returning to Fearington from her weeklong medical leave, and he called her. Of course she said yes, this venture was right up Vera’s twisted little alley. He gave her her instructions.

  “How long will it take you?” he said.

  “I’m not far away,” Vera said. “Forty minutes max.”

  Forty minutes later, he took the stairs down from the official Fortress offices to the auxiliary office used by Blunt between assignments. Try as he might, he could never get used to Blunt’s new legend name, Willowicz.

  Blunt was making coffee, or what passed for it in this stinking hole.

  “I’ve got a job for you and O’Banion.”

  “It had better pay well,” Blunt said, “I’ve got gambling debts up the wazoo.”

  “As a matter of fact, it does,” Gunn said. “It’s a rush job—gotta be done today.”

  “I don’t like rush jobs—they have a nasty habit of turning out messy.”

  Gunn was anticipating his answer. “How’s triple your fee grab you?”

  “Right in the nuts. Who, where, and when?”

  Gunn gave him the particulars and left. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough, but he didn’t go back to his office. He had another destination. He had pondered his plan in agonizing detail ever since his thoroughly unpleasant meeting with Pawnhill. He was dealing with ghosts—very dangerous ghosts who between them had been responsible for twenty kills, possibly more. He wondered fleetingly whether Pawnhill had any idea of what a difficult assignment he’d given him. Knowing the bastard, he didn’t give a shit. Pawnhill wanted what he wanted; Pawnhill knew he was in no position to defy him.

  Someday, he thought, he was going to get out from under Pawnhill’s thumb. But, sadly, that day was not today.

  * * *

  “THE SCHOOL was nothing more than a front,” Edon said. “There are six orphans here—enough to keep the illusion going. The rest of us are like me—girls sold into slavery by their parents, or snatched off the streets. Either way, no one is looking for us.”

  They had taken the children down from the burning, ruined school, out of Tetovo, and into the deepest part of the first-growth woods to the northwest, where, safely far enough from civilization, they made temporary camp in a small clearing. Thatë sent his remaining men out to gather wood for a fire. Restless, he put himself on guard duty, walking the perimeter.

  Edon’s eyes searched Jack’s. “This is how it is, no danger to Xhafa or his people.”

  “How about when he moves the girls around?”

  Edon gave a bitter laugh. “He uses bribes and payoffs to local officials. You have to admire the machine Xhafa has put together. And he’s got something on everyone. The officials are taped taking their bribes—money, or sex from the little girls. I’ve seen some of the tapes because Xhafa would play them for his men while they drank and laughed. They were awful, disgusting—impossible to describe. Animals behave better. Afterward, Xhafa’s men would rape us, over and over.

  “For the girls, this was nothing new. The idea is to break their spirit. They’re treated like trash, used and beaten. They’re starved if they resist, and God help them if they rebel. They’re tied up in a lightless room, beaten, drugged, and gang-raped. The real hard cases are shot up with heroin. Once hooked, they become instantly compliant; they’ll do anything for their next fix.”

  She recited this litany of horror with an eerily detached voice, as if she were talking about a movie she had seen. But Alli was white-faced with rage. Jack could feel her trembling beside him.

  “This happened to you?” Alli said in a hoarse voice.

  “I was smarter than them,” Edon said. “I did what was asked of
me, I ingratiated myself with them, just as Arjeta had done. I became a favorite, they fell in love with my face instead of my body. Oh, occasionally one of them would try to rape me, but Arian always stopped them. Once, he beat his own man to a bloody pulp and no one came near me again.”

  Alli let out a long-held breath, but her fists were still tightly clenched and her eyes seemed to throw out sparks.

  “Speaking of Xhafa,” Jack said, “when did you last see him?”

  “Days ago,” Edon replied, “a week or more.”

  “But one of his men said he’d left the school only a half hour or so before the attack.”

  “He’s lying,” Edon said. “I saw him leave.”

  There was no mistaking her certainty. Jack admired her core of inner strength. He wondered whether that was a trait all three sisters possessed. And that thought brought him to the question of whether or not this was the right moment to tell Edon that one of her sisters had been murdered. Deciding that there was no good time for that kind of news, he determined to tell her. But first he needed to ask her a question.

  “Alli and I are friends of Annika’s.” He sensed Alli’s instant consternation, but she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. “She’s mentioned your name.”

  Edon’s face lit up. “You know Annika? That’s fantastic. My sisters and I love her.”

  “How do you know her?”

  Edon frowned. “Arjeta met her first, I think. Father has a terrible sickness—he can’t stop gambling. We were always in debt, sometimes horribly so. One time a representative of Xhafa’s came to him. He paid off his debt by selling Arjeta. Then it was my turn. By that time, Arjeta had become Dardan Xhafa’s favorite, and when Dardan was sent to America, Arjeta went with him.”

  That explained a lot, Jack thought. More pieces of the puzzle falling into place, bringing with them a new and expanded view of the picture. Annika had been in Washington recently. A coincidence? He didn’t think so.

  “Why did Annika contact Arjeta?”