Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (15 page)

   “Well, good, that’s a good attitude, I guess, and I’ll ask Sinisa, but like I said –”
   “He will never expect it. He thinks I am a frightened little bird. He thinks he has trained me. He thinks he has broken me, like I am a dog or a horse. He thinks all he has to do is show himself and then I will do whatever he says. I hope he does. I am glad he has come. I hope he comes to me and tries to tell me what I must do. He is the dog.” She finished with a few short sentences in Croatian. I was confident they weren’t polite.
   “You’re angry,” I said.
   “Angry? I am enraged. I am furious.”
   “Good. Good. I’m glad. But don’t get crazy, okay? It’s good that you’re angry, but I don’t want you taking a gun and trying to go find Dragan yourself. It’s fine if we just get out of here and leave him behind. You don’t have to track him down and kill him, understand?”
   “He should die a thousand times.”
   “I don’t doubt it. But the important thing here is your living, not his dying, okay?”
   She thought about that for some time before grudgingly saying, “Okay.”
   We looked at each other.
   “Wow,” I said. “I thought you’d burst into tears and run into your room or something.”
   For a moment I was afraid I shouldn’t have said that. But it made her smile, one of her rare thousand-watt supermodel smiles that surely brightened the mood of everyone within a five-mile radius.
   “I was not always the woman you found in Mostar,” Saskia said. “I am beginning to remember that. I am beginning to remember.”
* * *
From:      [email protected]
To:        [email protected]
Subject:   Re: the albanian times
Date:      30 Apr 2003 13:22 GMT
Get out of there. Never mind Sinisa. Just get the hell onto a boat and go to Italy. I’ll come meet you there and we’ll work things out. Seriously. Please. The email you just sent sounded way too much like the kind of email someone sends before they’re never heard from again.
If you can’t, then just, I don’t know, please just stay alive. Write me every morning and every night just to let me know you’re okay. Afternoons would be nice too.
Shit. I should be on the next flight out. Or your friends, Hallam and Steven and Lawrence. I’ll get in touch with them. What can we do? There has to be something.
Talena
PS You’re right, I would have killed you if you hadn’t told me.
PPS Give my love to Saskia, and keep some for yourself.
From:      [email protected]
To:        [email protected]
Subject:   Re: the albanian times
Date:      30 Apr 2003 23:09 GMT
Don’t freak out overmuch here. Really, it’s much less bad than it sounds. I’d rather have Sinisa protecting me than NATO.
We couldn’t go even if we wanted to. And we’re safer here than trying to go on our own, I’m sure of that. And I’m sorry, but there’s nothing you or Hallam or anyone can do at this stage. Just hang in there. It’s just four more days. We’ll be fine. I promise.
Love,
Paul
* * *
   Those last five days, when we were confined to Sinisa’s compound, I exorcised my daily bouts of restlessness by roaming the nearby wilderness rather than the streets of Vlore. The forest southeast of our back yard was replete with interlacing trails, presumably laid by animals and three thousand years of wandering Albanians.
   On the second day, I went deep into the woods, listening to Linkin Park’s
Hybrid Theory
on endless repeat as I walked. The forest overlapped occasional east-west ridges of stone that protruded ten feet from the ground like colossal ribs. The trail led up and over two of those ridges, then turned eastwards and parallelled a third. After a few hundred feet it bent around a shallow gulch, thick with fallen foliage, next to the ridge. Some kind of natural sewer, carved by rainwater, now a place where storm debris collected. I would have walked right past it if my presence hadn’t caused an animal to scuttle out of the gulch, across the path maybe ten feet in front of me, and away into the forest.
   It moved so fast I caught only a glimpse: lean, furry, maybe three feet long, somehow carnivorous in appearance. I couldn’t tell if it was a fox or a bobcat or some strange-to-me native Balkan animal. I looked into the gulch, and I saw something pale, something out of place. I walked to the edge of path and squinted. A bone. What I saw protruding from that loose scree of leaves and branches was the knobbed end of a large bone.
   I advanced into the gulch, curious about what kind of animal had died here. The bottom of the gulch was uneven muddy gravel and dirt, and I had to be careful with my footing. Twigs snapped and leaves crackled as I walked through the fallen branches and undergrowth, shin-high and deepening, slippery and spongy. I stepped on something harder than a branch, something smoothly convex, and I stepped back and looked down. Whatever it was, it was pale and white, and still mostly concealed. Without thinking I reached down to pick it up.
   It was a human skull.
   I stood frozen for several long seconds, cupping the skull upside-down in my hand like a soccer ball, staring at its inverted leer. I was surprised, but not appalled. My pulse immediately began to pound, adrenaline flooded my system, but my mind stayed coolly detached, observing with interest my own primal involuntary reaction to the presence of human remains. I told myself that the skull was no threat, it meant nothing to me. It felt clinically clean to the touch, smooth and dry and slightly dusty in my hand. I figured it was years old, maybe decades, some victim of an internecine Albanian squabble.
   The loud guitars screaming in my ears were suddenly oppressive. I fumbled for the Discman on my belt and switched it off with my free hand. The fingers of my other hand brushed a discontinuity. I rotated my hand and saw a small and neatly circular hole in the back of the skull.
   After a moment I put the skull down and began rummaging through the underbrush, propelled by morbid curiosity. I wanted to unearth the rest of the skeleton, or clothes, jewelry, something that might hint at the victim’s identity, why he or she had been murdered with a single bullet to the back of the brain. There was nothing around the skull. I returned to the bone that had first captured my attention and tried to pull it free from the brush. It shifted but wouldn’t give. I braced my legs and pulled as hard as I could.
   And most of a not-fully-decomposed human skeleton rattled out of the brush. Ragged leathery patches of dried skin still hung off its skull and rib cage. Sparse clumps of long desiccated hair dangled from its head. I held it by a shin bone.
   Gagging, I released the carcass and leaped back, tripped and fell backwards but kept scrambling away, crablike, heedless of the branches scraping my palms, until I was a good ten feet away. The revulsion was almost overpowering. When I scrambled to my feet, my instincts screamed: run, now, get away!
   But I didn’t. Instead I looked at the remains I had just unearthed for a long time, thinking. Then I walked over, crouched down, and examined them as closely as I could without touching it. There was a faint but extremely rancid smell, and I had to fight a wave of nausea. Flies had already begun to buzz around.
   I was no forensics expert, but I knew this victim had not died decades ago. More like months. Maybe weeks. The small size and long hair made me think it had been a woman. She too had been killed with a bullet to the back of the brain. Her arms were bound behind her with rusting wire.
   I searched the rest of the gulch. There was no need, the implications of what I had found were immedately obvious, but I kept searching all the same. I found a third skull. Then another intact skeleton, this one old enough that there was no hair or skin. Then an even older skull, missing its jawbone. I kept going, breathing hard, my heart thumping, but working slowly and methodically, in some kind of psychotic archaeological frenzy, as if it was vitally important that I unearthed every man and woman who had been murdered and interred in this hidden charnel house.
   I found eight human skulls in that gulch, but there were so many bones that at least a dozen bodies must have been disposed of there. Most of the remains were old and much-gnawed, the bones randomly jumbled. I supposed many bones had been carried away by animals. Both intact skeletons had their wrists bound behind their back. All but one of the victims had been killed by a bullet to the back of the head. The odd skull out had been crushed with something so heavy that its top half had broken into triangular fragments, like broken pottery. When I saw that, my nausea rose again and I had to stop and sit down a while, breathing heavily, before I could continue.
   Sinisa was responsible. That was obvious. It was not plausible that so many people had been killed over such a wide span of time, so near his headquarters, without Sinisa having given the orders.
   Maybe he had his reasons. Maybe these had been Sinisa’s rivals, employees who betrayed him, men who tried to kill him. It was easy to believe that. I wanted to believe that. Because the alternative was that Sinisa, my friendly charismatic CEO, whose lectures on morality and philosophy I found genuinely interesting, was a brutal mass murderer.
   A dozen corpses, at least one of them very recent. The mysterious zombies. Months and tens of thousands of dollars, at least, spent on unbreakably secure communications. In our haste to flee from a pack of wolves, Saskia and I had taken refuge in a dragon’s cave. Talena and I should have just put Saskia in the trunk of a car and tried to drive her to Italy ourselves.
   Maybe I had just discovered my own grave. Maybe, instead of going to the time and expense of bringing Saskia and me to America, Sinisa would take us on this much shorter journey when my work was done. I didn’t think so, not with the all the hints that Sinisa wanted me to continue to assist him when I returned to California, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility.
   I went back to the mansion. There were four guards with machine guns at its wrought-iron gate, and another two visible at the end of the road, new security posted since Dragan’s attack. If that really had been Dragan. I wondered if the guards had orders to prevent Saskia and me from leaving the compound. Probably yes. Probably we were prisoners.
   I returned to the glorified closet that was my office and sat down before my computer. I told myself to concentrate on my work. But it took a long time before I could focus on the lines of code that swam in front of me. For the rest of the day, if I wasn’t careful, if I looked at the screen the wrong way, I saw the toothy grin and cavernous eyesockets of the skeleton I had unearthed.
   I wanted to write Talena, tell her what I had found, have her call Hallam and get Major Botham to dig into Sinisa’s recent activities, try to find out what was really going on. But my computer was bugged, the keyboard monitor and packet sniffer tracked every word I sent to her, and we were forbidden to leave the compound. There was no way I could get word of my suspicions to anyone else without Sinisa knowing about it. And even if we did, we were long past the point at which anyone could save us if he did decide to betray us. Nobody, not Talena, not Hallam and Lawrence and Steve, not Bond James Bond, could help us now. We were on our own.
* * *
   Two days after finding Sinisa’s personal cemetery, just before midnight on the second of May, two days before we were due to depart, I was still working. I had written all the code the system needed, but I still had to test it, then prove to Arwin and Sinisa that it worked. I had run enough tests that I was confident in the system, but I wasn’t certain, and given the newfound possibility that my life was on the line, I intended to keep testing until the last possible minute.
   I was running boundary tests, trying zero-length messages, messages that were too long, invalid public keys; situations that should never happen, but “should never happen” is a phrase that makes programmers very wary indeed. I found what I thought was a bug with the way the system handled excessively long messages, in itself just a curious anomaly but one that might lead to a real problem. I spent twenty minutes tracking it to one of the Stegosaurus interface points, and from there into one of Arwin’s many files of C code. I would have asked him about it, but he was sleeping.
   I opened the file up and winced. This little program was short but incredibly hard to read, much more confusing than Arwin’s usually-intuitive code. I considered going to bed and asking Arwin about it in the morning, but my bug-hunt blood was up, so I sighed, resigned myself to a long night, and began to trace the convoluted logic of Arwin’s program.
   About an hour later I sat bolt upright. What I had found wasn’t a bug. It was brilliant code, obfuscated so thoroughly that no one but an expert programmer could ever understand it. Definitely Arwin’s. I recognized his style.
   It was a back door.
   In hacker parlance, a “back door” is a security hole built into a system by its creator, usually a hidden password that grants complete access. The Stegosaurus, Arwin’s program that converted a message into a picture hiding an unbreakable coded version of that message, actually had two back doors. One was there by design. Every message that went through the system was encrypted twice; once with the recipient’s public key, and once, unbeknownst to the user, with Sinisa’s public key, so that Sinisa could read any message anyone sent. Arwin had written that back door for Sinisa, as requested; and then, secretly, he had added one for himself, programmed Stegosaurus to generate a hidden
third
copy of every message as well, encrypted with his own public key.
   It might not indicate any ulterior motives on Arwin’s part. He might have just decided that since he had written the damn system he had the moral right to read everything hidden within. But it was a massive, gaping security hole. Maybe Arwin planned to sell access to Sinisa’s system to the highest bidder. Maybe Arwin was a KGB plant. Since the shootout on the pier, and my gruesome discovery in the forest, no speculation seemed too farfetched. Selling access later on seemed most likely. I liked Arwin, but the idea was entirely in character.
   I didn’t even consider telling Sinisa. It seemed very likely that such a report would greatly truncate Arwin’s lifespan. Despite his many flaws, I liked Arwin a lot, and he had arguably saved my life on the pier, as far as I was concerned he had earned himself a return to the USA.