Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (14 page)

   I tried to get up to my feet and he pulled me back down, hard, shouting at me in Russian before realizing and switching to English, “Someone’s shooting at us, you fucking idiot! Stay the fuck down!”
   I stayed down. The base of the crane was a solid metal platform about three feet high and I hugged the pier behind it as adrenaline and understanding finally began to course into me. Someone was shooting at us. A bullet had struck the pier, and then the crane, both of them missing me by only a couple of feet.
   There were more popping noises and ticking sounds, and one splash. Then loud barking noises that I recognized as gunshots, from the dockside area where pier met land. A dissonant chorus of whimpering fear-noises rose from the ship. Arwin wiggled away from me and turned around to peer around the corner of the crane, still prone. After the moment I did the same. If the gunmen were at the end of the pier there would be no way out other than jumping into the sea. I doubted all the refugees on the boat could swim.
   “There,” Arwin said. We were facing back towards the land, and he was pointing at a big building on the waterfront just to the right of the chain-link fence that delimited the docks area. “That building there. I saw a flash up top – there!”
   I saw it too, a brief white flicker, followed immediately by another clang! from the crane. Then the hollow pop of the gunshot, dawdling at the speed of sound and arriving a couple of seconds after the bullet. There followed a fusillade of a half-dozen shots from where the pier met the land.
   “What about there?” I asked, pointing to the end of the pier.
   “Those are our guys. Security. Shooting back.”
   Another flash of light from the building. This one prompted a shocked cry of pain from the fishing boat. Someone had been hit. More shots came from the dockside. There was movement to my left and I twitched violently with panic but it was only Sinisa, elbow-crawling next to us, a small pistol in his hand. I hadn’t realized he went around armed. He wore a disturbing grin, like he was actually enjoying this.
   “I am so terribly insulted,” he said. “How dare they not shoot at
me?
”
   I decided he had gone crazy.
   “If they are serious, they will come through the fence now,” Sinisa said. “If they do, go into the water and swim north. Do not go towards the beach. Swim to the north end of the bay. Do not go back into Vlore. Go to the highway and get a
furgon
to Tirana. Leave a message at the English-language bookstore in Skandenberg Square.”
   “Skandenberg Square,” I said, trying to burn his instructions into my memory.
   “I should have told you these procedures before. But I did not think, nobody thought there would be a problem.”
   “You think it’s Mladen?” Arwin asked.
   “No. Mladen would have shot at me first, not our Canadian friend.”
   I stared at him, appalled. “They were shooting at
me?
”
   “That or they hired a blind sniper.”
   “Your buddy from Bosnia,” Arwin said. “Dragan.”
   There were two more shots from the dockside, and men shouted at one another. I tensed up, waiting for a bulldozer or something to crash through the dimly visible chainlink fence. The low bleating from the ship rose into a horrific coruscating howl of pain.
   “Shot in the stomach,” Sinisa said. “The shock has worn off.”
   We lay there for I don’t know how long, your sense of time is massively dilated in a situation like that, but it felt like forever. Probably three or four minutes. The pier was cool and damp against my skin. My hands burned with the half-dozen splinters that had thrust into them when Arwin had tackled me to the ground. I was sweating like this was a boxing workout. The screams of the person who had been shot, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, faded into gurgling coughing whimpers. My mind felt weirdly dissociated from my body. I felt half-convinced that I was in some controlled environment, some Disney ride,
Smugglers of the Adriatic
, all the people around me were just animatrons and if I really needed to I could go through the emergency exit at any time. I wasn’t really pressing myself against this damp pier jutting from a rotting Albanian city, fifty feet from a boat full of Third World refugees, one of them groaning from a gunshot wound, tensely waiting for a crowd of killers to swarm through the fence and come charging at us.
   Headlights appeared outside the fence. I swallowed and measured the distance to the edge of the pier, tried to guess how far down the water was. Twenty or thirty feet. At least jumping into the ocean would clear my fear-fuzzed head.
   The men inside the fence ran to the gate, opened it, and allowed a half-dozen figures with AK-47s inside. I recognized Zoltan and Zorana among them. Our people. We were safe.
   “What an interesting development,” Sinisa said. He pressed his hands into the pier and vaulted upright like a yoga master. After a moment I climbed awkwardly to my feet and Arwin followed.
   I looked over at the boat. The man who had been shot, Afghani if I guessed his ethnicity correctly, had been standing right at the edge of the crowd. Now he lay sprawled on deck, one foot hanging over the side of the boat, clutching his hands on his belly, lying in a pool of his own blood. He shuddered violently. Every breath was a battle and he seemed to have lost the strength to cry out. The rest of the passengers had moved away, cleared a semicircle of open deck around him as if he was contagious.
   The ship’s crew approached Sinisa. He directed a few curt words at them and they nodded and rushed back to the ship. One of them began to unwind the thick mooring rope.
   “What’s going on?” I asked. “What are you doing?”
   “They are leaving.”
   “What about him?” I pointed at the wounded man.
   Sinisa calmly aimed his gun at the fallen man and shot him in the head.
   I jumped as if shocked with ten thousand volts, and gaped at Sinisa as he re-safetied his gun and tucked it into the back of his belt. Then I looked over to the boat and the dead man sprawled on its deck. The other refugees stared at Sinisa in frozen, terrified silence. My mind kept replaying the sledgehammer sound of the gunshot. I couldn’t believe I had just seen him kill a man as casually as I might flick off a light switch.
   “He was beyond saving,” Sinisa said. “They will bury him at sea. Come. We have much to do.”

“You have brought a very large amount of trouble with you, Paul Wood,” Sinisa said.
   I shrugged uneasily. “Are you sure it’s Dragan?”
   “No. But I know the Mostar Tigers left Mostar a week ago, and have not been seen in Sarajevo.”
   I said, “I thought you would know if Dragan left Bosnia.”
   “The fact I did not know tells us they were assisted.”
   “Assisted?” I didn’t like the sound of that. “By who?”
   “I do not know. It is the nature of my business that I have many enemies. I think one of my enemies helped the Tigers into the country, shelters them, uses them to attack me indirectly.”
   “Right. So what’s the bad news?”
   He didn’t get the joke and looked at me quizzically.
   “Never mind. What’s the plan?”
   “You do not leave my compound, you or Saskia,” Sinisa said. “Here there is no danger. They will not dare a frontal assault. I hope they do, but they will not. We are vulnerable only to ambush or a sniper, and if you remain in my compound, neither can occur. You will be safe, I assure you.”
   “That’s a relief. For a moment there I was worried.”
   Sarcasm was wasted on Sinisa, it just didn’t compute. “I am glad you are relieved. Furthermore, I am advancing our schedule. We leave for America in five days, not eight. Your system will be complete by then.” It wasn’t a question.
   “If we’re so safe, why are you advancing our schedule?”
   “That is an independent development,” he said smoothly.
   Sure it was. “If you say so. Anything else I should know?”
   “Yes,” Sinisa said. “There is one thing. I want you to remember, Paul. When you are in America, safe in America, I want you to remember the risk I am taking for you. One day I may ask you to take risks for me.”
I was not in a good position to argue. “I will remember,” I promised.
   “Good. Go to work. Five days.”
* * *
From:      [email protected]
To:        [email protected]
Subject:   Re: the albanian times
Date:      29 Apr 2003 01:50 GMT
Big trouble in little Albania. I got shot at tonight. I’m okay. Everyone’s okay except some refugee who got hit by a stray bullet. He didn’t make it. I don’t even know where he came from.
S thinks D is in town and he’s teamed up with one of S’s business enemies.
I wasn’t going to tell you any of this, but I guess you want to know, even though I know it’s going to stress you out and there isn’t anything you can do. Plus I figure you’d rip my head off if I didn’t tell you and you found out later.
I’m not all that worried. We’re going sooner, now, and as long as we stay in S’s compound, we’ll be fine. Don’t go crazy worrying too much about us, all right? We’ll be okay.
Love,
Paul
   When I left Sinisa’s mansion that night, around midnight, I paused outside the gate and took a good look at the street on which I lived. I was seeing everything with new eyes that night, Sinisa’s deck, the room in which I worked, the windows of our house. Believe me, you start viewing your surroundings in an entirely new manner when an invasion by armed men who badly want to kill you becomes a plausible near-future event.
   The air outside was refreshingly cool, and I wondered if the heat wave was finally fading. Two dim lights mounted above the iron gates of Sinisa’s mansion provided eerie, dreamlike illumination. I looked up and down the street and again wondered why it existed, why Sinisa had built a dozen houses for the zombies, how long the zombies had lived here, why they had come all the way from Serbia to live in Sinisa’s compound. It must have cost a fortune. Sure, labour was cheap and the houses were slapped-together crap, but Sinisa still had to have paid for electricity, running water, septic tanks, all this for a couple of dozen middle-aged Serbians who spent their days doing fuck-all.
   With the gate to my back, ours was the fourth house to the right. To the left, past the houses on that side, the ground fell steeply towards Vlore. To the right it sloped gently upwards into untamed land thick with bushes and clumps of trees. For the first time I understood the terrible appeal of land mines. At that moment I would have liked nothing more than the knowledge that the land around Sinisa’s compound was sown with lethal and undetectable explosives. But it wasn’t, or he would have warned us when we first arrived.
   I wasn’t tired. I wanted to go for a walk, but of course I had just been told not to leave the compound for any reason whatsoever. I wanted a cigarette, but Arwin was already asleep. I walked to our house, intending to try to sleep, but at the last second I changed my mind and went around the house, walked through our backyard of thigh-high weeds and into the forest.
   I was violating Sinisa’s direct order, and technically endangering myself, but that didn’t really concern me. If the Tigers were waiting in the forest right behind our house then Saskia and I were pretty screwed anyhow. Leaves and branches clawed at my face and I pushed them aside. Once I was past the first screen of trees the forest was very dark. I began to wonder what the hell I was doing and why I hadn’t stopped in my room to pick up my Maglite.
   Then I stepped on something hard. I knelt and felt around, ran my hands over a cracked dome of concrete. Of course. A bunker, one of Hoxha’s omnipresent mushrooms. Good enough, I decided. What I wanted was a quiet contemplative place to sit and think. This would do. I sat down at the apex of the bunker’s six-foot-diameter dome, and I began to ponder.
   I couldn’t shake the image of Sinisa’s callous execution of the Afghani man on the boat. Maybe he had been dying, but we could have taken him to the hospital or called a doctor, we could at least have tried to save him. The idea had not even crossed Sinisa’s mind. So much for Robin Hood.
   I shouldn’t have been surprised. The man had a private army, he invited snipers to his business meetings, his closest assistants were Zoltan and Zorana, not exactly Central Casting’s answer to Friar Tuck and Maid Marian. And yet I had somehow let him convince me with a few honeyed words that he was on the side of the angels.
   They call it the Stockholm Syndrome, when hostages begin to support and identify with the hostagetakers. When someone controls your life and the hour of your death, you desperately want to believe that they are good and noble. And Saskia and I had fallen completely into Sinisa’s power the moment we crossed the border into Albania.
   Sinisa didn’t want to be Robin Hood. He had told me so himself. He wanted to be a CEO like Jeff Bezos or Gordon Moore. Maybe Pablo Escobar was a better analogy, cocaine emperor of the eighties, multibillionaire smuggler, at one point the eleventh wealthiest man in the world. Escobar had been assassinated, hunted down by American soldiers using advanced electronic surveillance techniques. I suspected Sinisa knew all about the killing of Pablo Escobar. I suspected his investment in Mycroft had something to do with that history lesson.
   Illegal immigration wasn’t exactly cocaine smuggling, but it was big business. I had read a lot about it in the last few weeks. At least ten billion dollars a year, estimated
The Economist
, spent in every corner of the globe. Mexican “coyotes”, who escort hundreds of thousands of the undocumented over the US border every year, some of whom begin their journeys in Bolivia or Paraguay. Chinese “snakeheads,” who fill shipping containers with people and send them from Shanghai to Long Beach, or buy old freighters, pack them to the gills with people, and sail them across the Pacific. Balkan gangs like Sinisa’s who conduct their clients-slash-victims, Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, Kurdish, Arabian, Turkish, name your nationality, into Western Europe. Moroccans who cross the Straits of Gibraltar in rowboats overcrowded with Africans who might have come all the way from the Congo. Other Africans go south, hitch or jump trains or just walk, sometimes thousands of kilometres, all the way from their homes to Johannesburg or Cape Town. Haitians and Cubans take insane risks to come to Florida on rafts made of inner tubes. Indonesians come to Australia on stolen ships sold to them by the pirates who still ply the Straits of Malacca.
   Like all crime, all smuggling, it was most rampant, most blatant, in failed or crippled states like Bosnia or Albania, places where corruption is so pervasive it almost isn’t corruption any more, where money paid to government officials is not seen by either side of the transaction as a shameful bribe, but simply as a fee for services rendered, capitalism at its purest. I wondered how much of Sinisa’s four million dollars a year went to various levels of the Albanian government in exchange for protection, for permission to build his own private enclave, for the blind eye turned as Sinisa openly ran his smuggling business out of the waterfront of one of the country’s major ports. Albania had signed and ratified several international agreements binding it against the trade in human beings, but what did paper matter when Albania was so poor, and the Italian coast was only fifty kilometres away, and so many people would pay so much money to be conveyed to the legendary uttermost West?
   I wondered what I would have done, if I had grown up in Bangladesh or Afghanistan. I suspected I would have pestered the smugglers there from age twelve until they agreed to send me to London just to shut me up. Home had never meant much to me, had never been the necessary anchor it seemed to be for others. For years I had wanted only to wander, had dismissed the nesting instinct as an impulse of the weak and unadventurous. Now I was not so sure. I was twenty-nine years old. Did I really want to roam forever, dancing across the world like a water-spider on a stagnant pond, never making any impression?
   I was a proud Canadian, but my ties to Canada were loose and distant. I had lived in San Francisco for five years, but it had never really felt like my home. Moving in with Talena had made me feel even more dissociated and detached. I was always acutely aware that it was her apartment, never ours.
   Did I even want a home? What did “home” mean? A mailing address, I supposed. That was a start. A place to lay your head. Mark Twain’s definition: the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. The place where your friends live. Whatever that means. My friends were scattered around the globe. Most of the people I was closest to, Hallam and Nicole and Steve and Lawrence, lived in London, where I couldn’t reside without fighting my way through parsecs of red tape and visa paperwork.
   My family, never close, had fragmented. Talena was family, sort of, except I was still on the brink of being dumped. That weird relationship paradox: is your girlfriend more like family, or your friends? You’re far closer, much more intimate, with your girlfriend – but at the same time you both know, although you probably never speak of it, that this intimacy is probably temporary, that one day the relationship will be Over.
   Maybe I wasn’t meant to have a home. Maybe, if and when I got out of this Albanian mess, if and when Talena dumped me, I should go back on the road. Volunteer in Africa for a year, or use Sinisa’s money to spend six months travelling overland from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. It didn’t feel like a healthy idea. But what else was there for me to do?
* * *
   “From the twilight’s last gleaming,” Saskia sang from the bathtub, and paused. “Paul,” she called out, “what is a gleaming?”
   I looked up from my cup of Nescafe. “Like a little flash of light,” I said. “But dimmer than a flash.”
   “I see. Thank you.”
   She went back to her idiosyncratic version of The Star-Spangled Banner. I had taught it to her only yesterday and her melody was inventive. I considered draining the rest of my coffee and escaping to work. I wasn’t looking forward to telling Saskia that her husband and his band of not-so-merry men were in town and heavily armed. But it had to be done.
   “Over the land of the free,” Saskia sang, getting the melody right for this part, “and the home of the brave.” I heard water splash and then begin to drain from the tub. After a few minutes she emerged from the bath, wearing a towel. When we had first moved into the house she had brought a change of clothes into the bathroom and dressed before exiting, but we were now so accustomed to each other’s presence that she had stopped bothering.
   She had lost weight since coming to Albania, she looked even smaller than before. I wondered how tall she was exactly, and how much she weighed. Five feet one, maybe, a full foot shorter than me, and certainly less than a hundred pounds. With her pale skin still gleamingly damp from the bath, she looked like a not-quite-life-sized doll.
   “Lazy man,” she mock-scolded me when she returned from her room, dressed in a denim skirt and a white shirt, and found me still in the kitchen. “Should you not go to work?”
   “We need to talk,” I said.
   She cocked her head at me, sensing from my tone that the topic was something more serious than the quality of the coffee she made, a running joke between us. She sat down across from me. I looked across the cheap folding table at her and tried to find the right words. There didn’t seem to be any, so I was blunt.
   “We’re pretty sure Dragan is here,” I said. “And the Tigers. One of Sinisa’s enemies is helping him. Somebody came after us on the pier in Vlore last night. They killed a man. One of Sinisa’s refugees. They were shooting at me.”
   She stared at me disbelievingly.
   “Sinisa says we’ll be fine,” I hurried to add. “We’ll be safe here. But you and I are not supposed to leave this neighbourhood any more, for any reason.”
   For a while she didn’t react. I started to wonder if she was in shock.
   Then, to my considerable surprise, she said, “I would like a gun.”
   I mentally replayed the words I had just heard to ensure I had understood them correctly. “A gun,” I said. “I…a gun? Uh, jeez, I don’t know, I can ask, but I don’t know if Sinisa’s going to want to give us any guns –”
   “Sinisa took guns from us already,” she said. “He should give them back.”
   “I guess, but –”
   “I know how to use them. I have killed men before. Did you know that?” Her voice was sharp, hard, angry. It was so unlike the voice of the timid, diffident Saskia I had come to know that if she had suddenly rotated her head 360 degrees, Exorcist-style, I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised.
   “Uh, yes,” I said. “Talena said.”
   “Give me a gun, and if I see my husband I will kill him myself.”