“What are you, morons?” Quinn shouted. “We didn’t go to all this trouble so she’d get there with a goddamn subdural hematoma.”
The men filed sullenly out of the container.
“Listen up,” Quinn said to the guard and the medic. “She’s a beautiful woman. You might be tempted to have some fun on the way. If she gets there and there’s a scratch, a bruise, a blemish, her hair’s messed up—swear to Christ, guys, I’m gonna put a bullet in both your goddamn brains. Got it?”
The medic and the guard nodded.
“Good.” Quinn said. “See you there then.”
Quinn closed the door and watched as the port inspector crimped the customs seal onto the door.
“What I’m giving you?” the inspector said. “This here’s a high-security bolt seal, more or less tamper proof, color coded, imprinted with a unique number so you can track it from shipper to destination. High-security seals receive faster customs clearance than standard, what we call ‘indicative,’ seals. Faster’s better, am I right?”
“You are indeed.”
The inspector looked up nervously at Quinn as he pocketed the crimping tool. “So, ah . . . now’d be a good time to take care of the other half . . . ?”
Quinn looked at him blandly, watching the man squirm.
“The five thousand,” said the inspector.
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about that . . .” Quinn looked around. “And my feeling is . . . now’s not such a good time.”
In a flash, Quinn pulled out his telescoping baton and hit the man four times in the head. His skull was cracked by the third blow. But Quinn always gave himself that one extra lick. Because a life that was all business was no kind of life at all.
Chapter Thirteen
Charlie let the hot water run over his weary body, though right now he couldn’t care less about getting clean. This shower was about knocking the cobwebs out of his brain so he could concentrate on what had happened last night. There were so many gaps in his memory, no doubt the effect of all the drugs, but he tried to piece it together . . .
The repetitive questions about whom Julie worked for and what she knew. Was there a safe in the house? Where did she keep her computer? On and on it went. Charlie with nearly nothing to give them. Except Becca. And he’d managed to hold on to that. To keep her out of it. Safe.
Who was Julie working for? That was the main one. The one they kept harping on.
Charlie and Becca had already called all of her old contacts at World Vision, but none of them had heard from Julie in months or had any idea that Julie was coming to London.
Then what was she doing there? Who was she seeing? How had it led to all of this?
Charlie forced himself to return to the interrogation, to try to put himself back in that basement.
He remembered now—that he was sitting in the chair, slumped over and depleted. There was a sharp prick in his arm and then a soft buzzing noise. The world began to grow shaky and dim, like a fade in some black-and-white movie from a hundred years ago. Later—he had no idea how much later—he felt hands pulling him out of the chair. Then the carpet against his cheek and a pair of boots walking in front of him. Then someone speaking in a foreign language.
Suddenly it dawned on him—it was Russian they were speaking.
One of the goons said, “Are we taking him to Tashkent?” He’d meant Charlie. And what did Bull say . . . ? Charlie opened his eyes and looked out the shower door, as if the memories might drift up here from the basement. What did Bull say?! He called the other guy “durak”—an idiot—and then he said, “We’re going to have a hard enough time getting the woman there.”
Charlie’s eyes widened.
Julie was alive. And they were taking her to Uzbekistan.
Charlie hustled out of the shower, toweled himself off quickly and made a beeline for his cell phone. Many of his old contacts were still programmed into the phone and he would begin there. First on his list was Faruz: the most resourceful, most connected of them all. He only hoped Faruz hadn’t changed his phone number—six years was a long time. He dialed and waited. Uzbekistan must be one of the few places in the world where one still got an echoey faraway ring on a long-distance call.
Two rings, three . . .
Charlie glanced at his watch. It was after midnight in Tashkent but he certainly wouldn’t be waking Faruz. Finally, he heard a click and then an outgoing message in Russian: “You reach Faruz, tell me what you need.”
After a few seconds the beep kicked in and Charlie left a message: “Faruz, it’s your old friend Charlie. Charlie Davis. I need your help. Badly. Call me as soon as you can.” He left his cell and home numbers and hung up.
He was about to make the next call when he noticed Oliver standing in the doorway, bleary-eyed and disheveled and still wearing yesterday’s clothes.
“Dad?”
“Hey buddy.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“Oh, that was just . . . that was just an old friend. Someone who can help us find Mommy.”
But Charlie had a queasy feeling in his stomach. Because speaking the words aloud to Oliver made what he was saying naked and plain. He was phoning people ten thousand miles away, people he hadn’t spoken to in six years, people who no longer owed him much loyalty, people who may or may not have any resources whatsoever to help . . .
And in that moment, he knew that finding Julie was not going to happen from his armchair in Los Angeles. It was going to have to happen with his boots on the ground. It was going to mean leaving his children.
“Do you know where she is?” Oliver asked.
“I have some idea,” Charlie said.
“Are you going there?”
Charlie stepped toward his son and got down on a knee. “You know if I do that, you and your sister will have to stay here.”
“So?”
Charlie looked at him.
“You need to find her, Dad.”
Charlie searched his son’s eyes. These were not the eyes of a young boy demanding an extra birthday present or some ice cream. These were the eyes of a fully formed person, utterly serious, intuitively aware of the gravity of the situation.
“Find her,” Oliver said again, as if he suspected his father needed a final push.
Charlie brushed aside Ollie’s hair and touched his face.
“I will.”
Chapter Fourteen
There was only one set of connecting flights that would get Charlie to Tashkent that day and the outbound from LAX didn’t leave for another ninety-two minutes. Which left him just enough time to get to his bank. The one thing he knew he would need in Uzbekistan was money. Cash on hand for bribes and payoffs. It was a way of life there, and without it he would barely make it out of the airport.
Inside the Wells Fargo on Montana Avenue, he was ushered into an office by the assistant manager, a chatty Rubenesque young woman in a suit that was about one size too small. “Hi, Mr. Davis. Read your piece last week in the Times about that budget thing. Amazing, isn’t it, how these crooks think you can—”
“I’m in a bit of a rush,” he said, cutting her off. “If you don’t mind?”
Her smile faded. “Sure, sure, of course.”
Charlie slid a legal pad across the table. “I need to move some money around. It’s all written down right there.”
“Okay, yeah, sure,” she said. “Now has anybody talked to you about the tax implications of taking money out of a Roth IRA and moving it to—”
She caught the gleam of impatience in his eye and this time cut herself off.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she said, hopping up from the desk.
The instant she stepped away and he had a moment to himself, his mind turned to Becca and the children. Clearly, there was no one he would rather have left them with, no one he and Julie felt more comfortable with, but still—he already felt a physical ache at being separated from them. During their good-byes, he’d hugged each of them so tightly
that he feared he might actually crush them. But Oliver was resolute as ever, without an ounce of sentiment that Charlie should stay. And Meagan had given him a small drawing she’d recently made in preschool—“for Mommy,” she’d said. He’d caught Becca’s eye in that moment and they both nearly lost it. But she’d rebounded quickly and whisked the kids into the playroom for a game of Chutes and Ladders. That was the last he’d seen of them before he left the house.
He’d considered having Becca take the kids somewhere else—to be safer—but he was quite sure that Bull was done with all of them. Most important, he’d overheard Bull saying, “We’re going to have a hard enough time getting the woman” to Tashkent, which meant that Bull and his goons were probably already out of the country and on their way to Uzbekistan with Julie. How he was planning on taking her there—and why—was the question that was plaguing Charlie. But as his mind turned to that question, the assistant manager returned, chipper as ever.
“Okay, super, so we’ve got the IRA and 401(K) funds moved into checking. Was there anything else?”
“Now I’d like to make a withdrawal in this amount.” He wrote the amount on the legal pad.
$9,900.
“Would that be a cashier’s check?”
“Cash.”
The assistant bank manager adjusted her blouse over her substantial bosom, a nervous little smile on her face. Banks were supposed to report any cash transaction over $10,000. United States customs made you report it when you took anything greater than $10,000 outside the borders of the country.
The only people who moved cash around in $9,900 increments were people doing something outside the law.
Charlie flashed her an impish smile. “If you wouldn’t mind . . . ?”
“How would you like that then?”
“Twenties, fifties and hundreds,” Charlie said evenly.
She got up, ducked behind one of the cashiers and soon returned with the money. As she slowly counted it out on her desk, Charlie looked at his watch. It was getting tight.
“ . . . and ninety-nine hundred.” Charlie grabbed the money and headed out.
“Mr. Davis?” she called to him. “Your receipt . . . ?”
She held it aloft, as if this was what he had really come here for.
“You keep it,” he replied and bolted out the door.
Back in his car, he stuffed the cash into a money belt and started the engine. The flight to London left in seventy-nine minutes. Traffic permitting, he’d have barely enough time.
As he raced down the 405, trying not to think of his harrowing journey from the night before, Charlie forced himself to concentrate. To put himself in journalistic mode. To be an investigator. How would Bull, being ex–Special Forces, possibly working for the CIA or some other government agency, smuggle Julie from Los Angeles to Uzbekistan? Some years ago, Charlie had written an explosive story about extraordinary rendition, the process by which American prisoners were flown to foreign jurisdictions where local authorities didn’t feel particularly burdened by the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on torture. Uzbekistan was one of the major destinations for this practice. That might explain why Bull’s men were speaking Russian. He was most likely using Uzbek mercenaries to minimize exposure—particularly in a covert and risky play like the rendition of an American citizen to a foreign country.
But even with the tacit approval of foreign governments like Uzbekistan, a covert agency still had to be careful about how they transported a prisoner. To avoid any paper trail that might lead back to the American government, they were often taken out of the country using shell companies. There had been much political backlash in the past few years against the use of rendition, but Charlie suspected these front companies might still be in existence.
He picked up his phone and dialed Mac at the Times. “Hey, bud, I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I need you to track down an international shipment . . . It was probably sent out of the Port of Los Angeles. But I suppose it could have gone out of anyplace on the West Coast. Ultimate destination Uzbekistan.”
“That’s all you got? West Coast to Uzbekistan?”
“Start with a couple of freight forwarders. One’s called Global Reach Logistics and the other is called . . .” Charlie probed his memory. “Corrigan Brothers.”
“What story is this for?”
“It’s an . . .” Charlie tried to think of something plausible. “It’s in the realm of an extradition-type thing. The package would need to be in something big enough to hold at least one person.”
“A dude in a box—that sounds a lot more like extraordinary rendition to me . . .” Mac’s voice trailed off nervously. “I mean, if I’m going to be getting a visit from Homeland Security in the middle of the night I’d like to at least have—”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“Because Sal didn’t mention you were working on anything—”
“Mac, I said it’s nothing like that,” Charlie said sharply. “Now I’ll need everything you can find. The shipper, destination, identifying numbers on the container . . .”
“Uh-huh.” The kid sounded skittish.
Charlie felt a bit sordid about the possibility—however distant it might be—of exposing Mac to the same people who had invaded his house. But Charlie simply didn’t have the expertise to track something like this down on his own.
“One last thing,” Charlie added, “I need to get into Julie’s email. Her account seems to have been wiped. Is there any way to recover emails in an account that’s been erased like that?”
“Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“The less I tell you the better,” was all Charlie said, but he knew it would convey the urgency. And the risks. There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “Mac?”
“Depending on the mail provider, there’s probably a way, but Jesus, Charlie—”
“This is very important to me, Mac. Life and death important.”
Again, there was a long pause. Was he losing the kid?
Finally a frightened, halfhearted voice answered him. “Okay, Charlie, I’ll try.”
As he hung up the phone, Charlie pulled off the 405 at Century Boulevard. One mile from LAX. He still had fifty-three minutes to catch his plane.
Chapter Fifteen
Charlie hadn’t slept on the flight over from L.A., not for even a minute, and exhaustion only contributed to his feelings of unease as he made his way through Heathrow and arrived at his gate. Three cheap cardboard posters on the wall indicated the gate was shared by Uzbek Air, National Airlines of Tajikistan and an airline with the optimistic name of Air! Line! Armenia!
Charlie surveyed the people around him. He could still look at the faces and gauge what ethnic groups they were from—Russians with their dyed-blond wives, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz. Some wore the blocky polyester suits of the post-Soviet republics while others donned the traditional flowing shirts and baggy pants of the region. The last time he’d seen this many people dressed like this was in Babur Square six years ago.
Charlie took out his phone and dialed Faruz again. This was his third call and he’d still heard nothing back. He left another message—this time leaving his flight details and arrival time. As he hung up, Charlie was hit with a stab of shame. Over all these years, he’d never once reached out to his old friend. For all Charlie knew, Faruz could be dead.
A thick accent crackled over the PA system, “Please, attention, is now boarding first class. Is now boarding, first-class passengers only.”
The message was repeated in Russian, Uzbek, Tajik, and Urdu, but the Uzbeks all ignored it, crowding around the door, pushing and shoving, tripping each other with their bags. A characteristic series of shouting matches and semisurreptitious exchanges of bribery ensued as the attendants at the gate tried to deal with the crush of people surging forward.
Andijan. That’s all Charlie could think about. Andijan.
And then his phone rang. Faruz? No—it
was Mac.
“Tell me you have something,” Charlie said as he stepped away from the crowd.
“Nothing on the container yet. There’s a lot of security on these things now. It’s taking me a while.”
“Well, how about Julie’s emails?”
“I got into her account, but it’s been wiped totally clean. No backups, nothing in the cloud, it’s just gone.”
“Damnit,” Charlie muttered.
“Hold your horses. I didn’t come up totally dry. I was able to access her computer remotely and I found some cookies on there that led to a second account.”
“What do you mean, second account?”
“She opened a second email account back in June.”
“And can you access her correspondence?”
“I can and I did.”
“Well, send it to me then.”
“I’m doing it now.”
“And have you read them?”
Mac hesitated. “Not all of them, no.” As Charlie pressed, he could feel a hint of embarrassment creeping into Mac’s voice. “The thing is . . . there’s eighty-six emails and they’re all from or to the same guy.”
Charlie’s heart sank. He knew he’d be able to read them soon enough, but he had to know. “Who’s the guy?”
“Somebody named Alisher,” Mac said.
Alisher Byko?
She’d been corresponding with Byko for almost a year from a secret account? With an ever-expanding pit in his stomach, Charlie thanked Mac, urged him to keep working on the container and found a place to sit.
It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Julie starts a secret email correspondence with Alisher Byko and now Special Forces guys are kidnapping her and taking her to Tashkent? Byko must have been the man she met in London.
Charlie opened his computer, logged on to his email and found the message from Mac. There was an attachment labeled “Julie’s recovered mail.” He clicked on it and found an extremely long text file, email after email jammed together without a break. As much as he wanted to know how their correspondence had started, to pore over every detail of every letter between them, he scanned down to the most recent email. If Byko was mixed up in her disappearance, this was the logical place to begin his research. The email had been sent last Sunday—May 5. Only six days ago:
Out of Range: A Novel Page 8
