Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (21 page)

“They’re so unprofessional over there,” he said, looking to the Mexican side of the border. “They make our job twice as hard as it needs to be.”
   He stamped my passport and passed it back.
   “Enjoy your visit,” he said to me, and to Talena, “Welcome home.”
   We thanked him. He pushed a button and the bar before us went up like a seig-heil salute. Talena stepped on the gas and we drove forward, away from the border, into the Promised Land, into America. Into America, free and clear.
* * *
   We called the number Sinisa had given us from an El Paso pay phone. It rang three times, then, after a brief pause, rang again. Some kind of automatic forwarding system.
“Yes?” Sinisa answered.
   “Sinisa,” I said. I felt nervous, like I was about to quit a job. Which in a way I was. “This is Paul.”
   “Paul. Good. I was worried about you. My associates told me you had not yet contacted them. Where are you?”
   “El Paso, Texas.”
   “Texas,” he said. “I am glad to hear that. Were my associates mistaken or did you elect not to employ their services?”
   “We decided it would be easier to cross by ourselves.”
   “Did you lose anything on the journey?”
   “No,” I said. “We have the briefcase. We want to know what you want done with it.”
   “Did you lose the address?” Sinisa asked. He had given us a Los Angeles address where we were meant to drop off the briefcase, en route to San Francisco. Talena and I had discussed actually going there, but it sounded too much like making a delivery to a crack house.
   “No,” I said.
   After a moment Sinisa said, “Paul, I do not understand why you are calling me.”
   “All right,” I said. I swallowed. “Listen. I’m very sorry. I have the greatest respect for you and for your vision. And I want you to know that I will never tell anyone about you, or what you are doing, or the work I did for you. But I don’t wish to continue our relationship any more, on a business or a personal level, as of today. I’ll mail the briefcase wherever you like, but one way or another, it leaves my possession today.”
   I waited, holding my breath, for what felt like a long time.
   Finally he spoke. “I am very disappointed, Paul. Surprised and very disappointed. I had high hopes for you.”
   “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I guess I’m not cut out for living your kind of life.”

“Do you know what was in that briefcase?” he asked.
   I didn’t want to get drawn into a guessing game. “No.”
   “Sand. Four kilograms of sand. Do what you like with it. You thought it was drugs? You thought I might give you drugs? Foolish, Paul, very foolish. I am a businessman. Illicit drugs, I assure you, are bad business. The profits are very high, but the risks even higher. Even if I did wish to send drugs to America, do you really think I would send so much, a briefcase full, perhaps a million dollars’ worth, with a man I had met only six weeks ago, with no escort, no security, no certainty? When I have Zoltan and Zorana here, who I trust implicitly, ready to do such things for me?”
   He raised a good point. After a moment I said, “Why?”
   “To see if I could trust you. To see if you would trust me. That is all. I thought you were a friend, Paul. I had high hopes for you. I am building an empire, an empire that will carry the weak people of this world to places where they can become strong, and I had a high place in it reserved for you. You are so stupid it makes me angry. I give you a chance to be part of something important, something noble, I give you a chance to change the world for the better, and you spit it back in my face.”
   “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. And I did feel bad about it. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I still felt a little like I was throwing away something wonderful, abandoning a chance at an extraordinary life in favour of that endless monotony called safety.
   “Zoltan and Zorana were right,” Sinisa said. “They told me you were weak, fearful, a little man. I thought there was more to you. But they were right. I pity you, Paul. I pity your little life. I think we will not speak again. Goodbye.”
   He hung up. I looked at the phone for a long moment before I did the same. I wondered if some day, years or decades from now, I might bitterly regret this phone call.
   “Well?” Talena asked, when I emerged from the pay phone.
   “Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all,” I said.
   “Maybe what?”
   “Never mind,” I said. “He won’t bother us any more, that’s what’s important. We’re clear.” I sighed. “So let’s go home.”
Three months passed.

“Christ, I’m a
sidewinder
, I’m a
California king
,” I sang along with Anthony Kiedis. “I swear it’s
everywhere
now, it’s
every
– oh. Oh. Hi. You’re home.”
   “You were expecting someone else?” Talena asked, from her seat at our computer, laughing as I sheepishly unhooked my Discman.
   “I thought you were out at the poetry reading,” I said.
   “I thought it would be more fun to stay home and listen to karaoke Chili Peppers. No, the reading was cancelled, three of the poets couldn’t make it. I was going to go to yoga but the time got away from me. How was boxing?”
   “Fun. Tough. But it’s not making me sweat as much as it used to.”
   “Yeah. Your shirt just looks sweaty. Not soaked. You know something, Mister Wood, you look pretty good these days. All this running and boxing is making you downright athletic.”
   “Yeah?” I asked, smiling. I smiled a lot these days, and it wasn’t just the post-workout endorphins. I had money in the bank, I was semi-gainfully employed at an interesting job, and I had just moved into a comfortable new apartment with the World’s Most Perfect Girlfriend.
   “Yeah.” She reached her arms up and stretched. “I should exercise more too. Stupid time-eating computer. And I meant to go grocery shopping. I think we have to eat out tonight. How does Thai sound?”
   “Sounds good to –” I began, and then the recognition center of my brain fired off a lightning bolt, and I stopped talking and looked at the computer screen. There were about a dozen passport-sized photos on screen, each with a little blurb of information beneath. I knew the man on the upper left.
   “What the hell?” I said.
   Talena blinked and followed my gaze. “What?”
   “What…that…what are you doing?”
   “Oh.” She shook her head. “Just, I don’t know, checking up. No progress, not really. They caught some minnow guy who shelled Dubrovnik and they unsealed a bunch more warrants and indictments, that’s all.”
   “You were checking up on Zoltan?”
   She looked up at me, confused. “On who?”
   “Zoltan,” I said. “That’s Zoltan.” I pointed at his picture. “The guy I told you about, who was with Sinisa. You met him, remember? For like ten seconds. Him and his wife Zorana. What are you looking at? What is this site?”
   I peered at the picture, which was captioned ‘Zoltan Knezevic, born 26.07.69 Vojvodina, warrant date 13.08.03, no known alias.’ The photo was black and white, taken from his left side. It was a few years old but there was no doubt it was him.
   “The guy who was with Sinisa,” Talena repeated slowly. She stared up at me as if I had spoken in some foreign language that she barely knew, and she had to slowly mentally translate. “You knew him. He was with Sinisa. This man right here,” she pointed at the screen, “you’re saying he was with Sinisa.”
   “Yeah. What is this? How did you get this picture?”
   “Oh my God.” She stared up at me with her mouth half-open.
   “What…” I looked at the page address, which started with ‘www.un.org/icty/’. “The UN? What does Zoltan have to do with the UN?”

She just looked at me.

A cloud of horrible comprehension began to congeal inside my skull.

“Warrant date? What the fuck is ICTY?” I demanded.
   Her voice was very quiet, almost a whisper. “The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” she said. “The war crimes tribunal. This is their list of wanted war criminals they’ve issued arrest warrants for. They just, he just, he’s on the list. He’s a war criminal. Three times over. I was just reading about him. He was at Omarska and at Keraterm and, Jesus, Paul, he was at Srebrenica, he helped
organize
Srebrenica.”
   “The doctor,” I said, pointing at another face, a row below. I felt cold and dizzy, like all the blood was draining from my body. “That’s the doctor. That’s the one who helped Saskia on the plane when she had that ear problem.”
   “Veselin Mrksic,” Talena said. “Oh my fucking god. He was on the plane too? He helped Saskia?” She shook her head disbelievingly.
   “What did he do? Why is he there?”

“He was at Vukovar Hospital. He was a doctor there, but he helped. There was a massacre. He murdered his own patients. Dozens of them. After that he was Mladic’s personal doctor. Ratko Mladic. The Serb general. King of the monsters.”

I scanned the rest of the pictures. “Oh shit. I think those two too. I think they came to Belize with us too.”
We stared at each other.

“War criminals,” she said. “You’re saying your friend Sinisa flew a planeload of war criminals over the Atlantic with you. Not just, I mean, criminals, that’s such a, that’s not the right word, I don’t think there is a right word, not for what they did. Evil. That’s the only word. These people on this page, they were the worst of the worst, they could have given lessons to the Nazis. Jesus, Paul, do you have any idea what these people did? Do you have any fucking idea?”

“I guess. I’ve read some books about it.”

“You guess. No you don’t. You don’t. Neither do I. You had to be there to have any idea. You know what Zoltan is wanted for? I was just fucking reading about him. For pushing a prisoner’s face against a red-hot stove until half his face was burnt off, then doing the other half. For smashing a prisoner in the face with a big chain until he didn’t have any teeth left and every bone in his face, every single bone, was broken and one eye was burst. For wrapping wire around a prisoner’s testicles, then tying the other end of the wire to his motorcycle and driving off. He had an office. It sounds like a sick joke, but he had an office. Omarska was an old mining complex and there were offices in the administrative building. Every day he would torture men in his office, then at night he’d take women into this office, high-school girls a lot of the time, with the men’s blood and shit and bones and brains all over the place, and he and his friends would make her clean it up, sometimes they made her eat it, and then they would bend her over the desk and gang-rape her and stick things in her until at least once a girl died of blood loss because she was hemorrhaging from everywhere. There’s more. There’s a lot more. That’s just his greatest hits, just Omarska. That doesn’t count Keraterm. That doesn’t count Srebrenica. Jesus, Paul, Srebrenica, seven thousand people slaughtered, fucking genocide, Zoltan was there, he helped organize it.”

“He’s here.”

“He what?”

“I told you. I think I told you. Last month, when I met up with Arwin, he said Zoltan and Zorana came with him to San Francisco.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I remember. You told me.”

We stared at each other.

I sat down, hard. The enormity of it all was beginning to hit.

Zoltan and the zombies were war criminals. Not smugglers, not drug dealers. They made murderers and arms dealers and child pornographers look like Mother Teresa. The things they had done were called crimes against humanity, and with reason. The other passengers on the Gulfstream that had carried Saskia and me to safety were two dozen of the worst people in the world. No hyperbole, no exaggeration, cold hard fact, up there in the pantheon of modern evil with the architects of the Rwandan genocide, the brutal SLORC generals who ran Myanmar, or the late unlamented Uday Hussein, to name a few. And Sinisa, ponytailed self-proclaimed-idealist Sinisa, had smuggled them out of the Balkans, away from the scene of their crimes, into the relative safety of Belize. Some of them had since come to America. Maybe all of them.

And I had helped them.

He had known. Sinisa must have known. He had known all along who they were. He had told me he was helping the poor and downtrodden, setting the world to rights, and I had taken his blood money and shrouded his operation in a cloak of absolute secrecy. It was like I had helped Goebbels and Eichmann escape Nazi Germany.

They would be almost impossible to catch now. In part because of me.

“What are we going to do?” Talena asked. “What in God’s name are we going to do?”
* * *
   What we were going to do was, we were going to call the FBI.
   It was a pretty stark choice. Stay quiet or go to the cops. There were a lot of reasons to stay quiet. Saskia, for one. Arwin, probably, I didn’t think he knew who the zombies were, I thought he was relatively innocent. In this newly paranoid America they could both easily get sucked in and chewed up by the vortex of an official FBI investigation. For all I knew they might wind up in Guantanamo Bay. Hell, I might wind up in Guantanamo Bay, it was farfetched but it didn’t seem impossible. I had been complicit in what Sinisa had done, ignorant or not I was probably culpable of something, aiding or abetting or who knows what. God knew it felt like I had committed a terrible crime. I had provided tangible assistance to some of the most horrific torturers and mass murderers in recent planetary history.
   We never really seriously considered keeping our mouths shut. We wouldn’t have been able to live with ourselves. Talena had been slightly obsessed with the hunt for Bosnia’s war criminals ever since she first escaped to America. I felt crippling guilt about what I had done, but at least I had the excuse of honest ignorance. Now that I knew the truth, doing nothing would be far worse than what I had already done. Saskia or no, Arwin or no, even me or no, silence was not an option.
   “It’s here somewhere,” I said absent-mindedly, digging through my NATO ammunition box, a gift from Hallam that contained all of my potentially-important-but-rarely-needed documents. “What happened to the one she gave you?”
   “I lost it. Didn’t she send you email? Can’t you get her name from that?”
   “That’s right. She did. I don’t – oh, here it is.” I dug a business card from the box. The FBI logo was embossed on the upper left-handed corner. “Turner,” I read. “Of course. I can’t believe I forgot. Must be getting old or something. Special Agent Anita Turner. Pass me my phone.”
   It was almost 9 PM but I dialled the number anyway on the off chance she was still in the office. The receiving telephone rang once.

 “Special Agent Turner,” she answered briskly.
   “Ms. Turner. Oh. Uh. Hi.” I had expected voice mail. “Uh, yeah, um, good to talk to you again. My name is Balthazar Wood. I don’t know if you remember me, but, um, we met a few years ago, about, uh…” I didn’t know how to describe it. I didn’t really want to talk about our previous encounter.
   “I remember you well, Mr. Wood.”
   “Oh. Good. I hope. Anyway, something’s happened, um, not at all related to what was going on back then, something else entirely, and the FBI needs to know about it. You really do. So, it’s complicated, I’d like to meet you if that’s possible, tomorrow if that’s possible, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
   “Is that so.”
   “Yes, ma’am.” Ma’am was not part of my usual conversational repertoire but it seemed appropriate. Agent Turner, if I recalled correctly, was very proper and 1950s.
   “What I remember most about you, Mr. Wood, is that less than a week after our last conversation, the subject of that conversation was found in Morocco, dead.”
   There wasn’t anything I wanted to say to that.
   “What is the subject you want to discuss?” she asked.
   “War criminals,” I said.
   “Excuse me?”
   “War criminals. Bosnian war criminals. They’ve been smuggled into America.”
   “Mr. Wood, this sounds a lot like a crank call.”
   “I know. That’s why I’m calling you. Because you know from our last conversation that I’m a serious person. You can probably also guess that I wouldn’t be calling you at all if I didn’t think it was absolutely necessary.”
   After a pause she said, “True. My office, oh-eight-hundred Friday.”
   “What?”
   “Oh-eight-hundred,” she said impatiently. “Be in my office at that time the day after tomorrow.”
   “Right.” I had forgotten that she talked in military time. “I’ll be there.”
   She hung up without another word. I supposed it was efficiency rather than rudeness.
   I looked over to Talena. “I hope this is the right thing to do.”
   “Me too. Me too. We better practice your lies before you go.”
   “Yeah,” I said.
   “She’s going to know you’re lying. She’s really fucking smart. I remember that.”
   “I know. I hope she’s smart enough to see I’m not lying about the important parts.”
   Talena nodded.

 “It all makes sense now,” I said. “Fucking war criminals. Fuck. That was so stupid. I should have known. I knew something was wrong with them, the zombies, but I didn’t know what. It was all so weird, I figured I was just being paranoid.”
   “Stop it. There will be no blaming yourself, understand?”
   “Easy for you to say,” I muttered.
   “Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. You were not stupid. You were in a desperate situation in an alien country and there is no way you could have known. You were lucky the warrants weren’t unsealed while you were there or they would have killed both of you. Now what about the Russian guy? Arwin?”
   “I don’t know.” I considered. “I don’t think he knew the whole story. He knew we were going to Belize, but he didn’t know much about the zombies. He acted more like he thought they were total losers, not scary war criminals. I hope he didn’t know. I like Arwin. You know, him I can get in touch with, he gave me his email – holy shit.”
   “What?”
   “His back door. Arwin put a back door into the system. I scrambled it but it’s still there.”
   Talena regarded me warily.
   “Basically,” I said, “if Arwin and I got together, we could break into Mycroft. That web site I built for them. Arwin put a back door in. All the messages there are supposed to be secret but if Arwin and I got together we could read them.”
   “Good. That’s good. You should tell the FBI that.”
   “Yeah. But. If I tell the FBI about Arwin they’ll probably lock him up. He was already deported, at least once, and now they’ll probably figure he’s some kind of dangerous hacker on top of that.”
   “Can’t make an omelette.”
   “Yeah, but…probably the one guy who doesn’t deserve to get screwed over is Arwin.”
   “Life is harsh,” Talena said curtly.
   “OK, point taken, getting Sinisa and Zoltan and the rest is more important. But still. We don’t actually need Arwin, we just need…basically we just need him to give us a password. If I can get him to give me that then we won’t have to sic the FBI on him.”
   “So now you’re going to lie about both Saskia and Arwin? And you’re still going to pretend that what you’re lying about isn’t important? Arwin’s password thing is probably the most important thing you can tell them. And he’s the one who told you that Zoltan and Zorana were here in the USA. All the important stuff is all about him.”
   “I think I owe him one chance,” I said. She was right, but I didn’t want to turn around and rat on Arwin without at least giving him a chance. “Tell you what. I’ll send him an email and tell him I have to talk to him tomorrow. Then I’ll give him one chance to give me the password. If he does then I won’t have to tell the FBI about him.”
   “You’re going to threaten him,” Talena said skeptically.
   “What, now you think I’m going too hard on him?”
   “You’re not thinking this through, Paul.”
   “What do you mean?” I asked.
   “I mean if you go to Arwin and threaten him and tell him you’re about to go to the FBI, he just might turn around, call your friend Zoltan –”
   “Please stop referring to him as my friend.”