Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (25 page)

 “Shit. Motherfucker. This is so fucked up.”

 “Yeah,” I agreed. “Why did you build that back door into Mycroft?”
     “I knew that was gonna get me into trouble. I knew it and I did it anyway.” He sighed. “I figured maybe there’d be some money if I wanted to live dangerously. Sell it to someone else or something. And, you know, it was kind of an Easter egg.”

  Easter egg: a flashy piece of code hidden in a program as a kind of signature. I had written a few myself.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Shit. This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. You sicced both Zoltan and the FBI on me because I wrote a back door that doesn’t even fucking work. There’s a bug on the live site. I don’t know what it is but that back door is fucked.”

 “Guess again,” I said.

 “Huh? I’m not guessing. I’ve tried. I’ve… “

 He stopped talking. A metaphorical light bulb lit up over his head.

 “Aw, no,” he said. “You’re shitting me.”

 “Nope.”

 “What did you do to it?”

 “Basic substitution cipher,” I said.

 “No shit. Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Either I’m dumber than I thought or you’re a whole lot smarter.”
   “Thanks. Might be both. Now listen carefully. If you give me the key, I think I can get the FBI to forget all about you. Maybe even give you some protection.”
   He looked amazed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
   “I’m serious. Give me the key and I’ll tell them to leave you alone.”
   “No fucking way! What are you, stupid all of a sudden? That key is the only thing I got. Zoltan’s a big-shot war criminal, huh? Man, all of a sudden that’s great news. That’s fucking great. You go back to them and tell them I’ll trade the key for immunity. And citizenship. And a clean record. And ten thousand bucks.”
   I winced. I should have seen that coming. It had never occurred to me that Arwin’s back door was now supremely valuable to him, his only bargaining chip, and he wasn’t likely to give it away for free. “I’m…Arwin, I’m not negotiating for the FBI. They don’t even know I’m here talking to you.”
   “So go and tell them. What did you expect, that you’d rat me out and I’d be so grateful I’d turn around and give you the only thing I’ve got? I should kick the shit out of you right now is what I should do.”

“I’m bigger than you are,” I pointed out.

“Yeah? How about Zoltan? Maybe I should say fuck the FBI and go tell him that the keep-your-mouth-shut memo he sent you last night doesn’t seem to have stuck.”

I snorted. “Good luck living long enough to finish the first sentence.”

He paused. “Yeah. True.”

“I’ll talk to the FBI. You don’t talk to anyone.”

“Fine,” he said.

We looked at one another.

“You still want that job?” I asked.

“Fuck you.” He sounded more sour than furious. “I’d rather work in a kitchen with Jeffrey fucking Dahmer than work with you again, you ratfuck piece of shit.”

“Always nice to see you too,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
* * *
   Talena was out at her rescheduled poetry reading, trying to live a normal life as Agent Turner had ordered. I decided to go to the Metreon and watch Johnny Depp play a zombie pirate. Hollywood escapism was just what the doctor ordered. I had rarely wanted to escape reality with such passion. I felt like I had been sucked into a vortex of chaos. Zoltan was a psycho bloodsoaked war criminal, Sinisa was an international smuggler of psycho bloodsoaked war criminals, Zoltan and Zorana had beaten and humiliated Talena and I and threatened to murder us, the FBI didn’t know how long it would take to catch them because one of their agents was a mole, and now Arwin, the only man who had the key that could open Sinisa’s vault of secret messages, the vault that I had helped build, wanted to negotiate a package deal with the FBI before he turned it over.

In a weird way I blamed Dragan. If Saskia’s husband hadn’t been such a sick thug, we would never have gotten involved in this. It was funny that just a few months ago it was Dragan who was the boogeyman we feared, when Saskia and I were living in Albania, when Sinisa and Arwin and Zoltan and Zorana were colourful friends and acquaintances. Now when I thought of Dragan, rendered small by time and distance, compared to Zoltan and Zorana he seemed about as scary as Johnny Depp.

At least Steve and Lawrence had responded to my call for desperate-times reinforcements, and were due to arrive on Friday. I knew I would feel a lot better with them around. But I also knew they couldn’t stay more than a couple of weeks.
   When the credits rolled I reluctantly got to my seat, energized by the sight of a good old-fashioned summer Hollywood blockbuster, but dejected at being flung back into the real world and all its treacherous chaos.
My cell phone rang as I walked onto Mission Street. I dug it out of my pocket, unwillingly envisioning terrible things, Agent Turner calling me to tell me in a grim voice that Talena’s mutilated corpse had been found. I looked at the caller ID and was semi-relieved to see it was Arwin.
   “Yeah,” I answered.
   “Hey. I broke your cipher.”
   “Not hard. So you looked at Mycroft?”
   “Yeah. And I’m not giving you the key, until I can cut some kind of deal, but you should come shoulder-surf some of this shit.”
   “All right. Now?”
   “I gotta eat. In, like, an hour.”

He gave me an address: the Deluxe Hotel on Leavenworth near O’Farrell. With a location like that I was pretty sure it didn’t live up to its name. That was right in the decaying heart of the Tenderloin ghetto.

“See you in an hour,” I said.

“And we’ll both be alone, right?”

“Right,” I agreed.

I called Talena and updated her on the situation. It was a relief to hear her voice. I knew that every time we parted, for the foreseeable future, a terrible fear would begin to cloud my mind, fear that we might never meet again, that Zoltan and Zorana might have found out we had disobeyed them, might have found Talena and taken her away and hurt her and killed her.
   After talking to Talena, I killed forty minutes reading magazines at the Borders bookstore off Union Square, then walked down Market Street, which was clogged with the usual crowd of downtown San Francisco’s homeless, filthy and bearded with running sores on their arms and faces, parked next to shapeless heaps that were all their worldy possessions, grimy lumps of clothes and sleeping bags, maybe a few books or a shopping bag full of recyclable cans. Some of them were addicts, some of them were deranged, some of them were just way down on their luck. They reminded me very much of the refugees I had seen on Sinisa’s fishing boat in Albania.
   From Market I turned up Leavenworth Street into the Tenderloin, the rotting core of downtown San Francisco, a ghetto populated by hookers and junkies, last-chancers and no-hopers, the homeless and those lucky enough to live in the squalid junkyard single-room-occupancy hotels that occupied virtually every corner. I passed broken windows and empty storefronts, porn stores, check-cashing stalls whose tellers sat nervously behind thick walls of bulletproof glass.
   The Deluxe Hotel was ironically named. At first glance it looked physically lopsided, but it wasn’t really, just viciously ugly, poorly maintained, coated with grime and smeared with half-erased graffiti. Two of the second-floor windows were broken, apparently from the inside. I was pretty sure that California’s next half-decent earthquake would reduce the whole building to rubble. Two wild-haired homeless men were passed out on the sidewalk in front of the iron cage which guarded the entrance. The whole area stank of urine.
   I gingerly stepped around the homeless men and pushed the stained white button next to the iron cage. After a moment the intercom grille above the button barked “What?” in a distorted, inhuman, barely understandable voice.
   “I’m visiting Arwin. Room 309,” I said.
   “I ain’t got no note about no other visitor.”
   “Call him up and ask,” I suggested.
   Laughter filtered through that intercom sounded downright scary. “Call him up? You think this the Fairmont? We ain’t got no telephones.”
   “Well, I don’t know. He asked me to come here.”
   “Well,” the voice said dubiously, “you know his name. And you look all right.”
   I supposed a camera was watching me from somewhere. The door buzzed. I went through the cage of the outer door, and the ancient interior door, to the desk, behind which sat a fat bald black man with a thick beard, a pierced septum, and at least twenty earrings, wearing a leather vest.
   The green paint on the stairs was faded, the air was thick with a whole collection of noxious smells, and I carefully avoided a syringe that had been abandoned on the first landing. The hallway, probably last cleaned in the 1930s, was an instant asthma attack. The door to room 309 was slightly ajar. I knocked and it yawned open. The room within was empty. After a moment I walked in. Maybe Arwin was still out at Burger King or something.
   The room was quite small. Everything was a uniform faded beige. The ceiling was low,  uneven, and water-stained. The walls were dusty and peeling. The bed was beneath the only window and was visibly lumpy. A tiny TV was in the corner of the room, high up on a stand that screwed into the wall. The bathroom door was closed. I was surprised that the hotel had individual bathrooms but no phones. I supposed Arwin connected to the Net via some kind of wireless connection. But no computer was visible.
   I wondered how long Arwin had been living here. I hoped he had just moved here today, in response to yesterday’s phone warning. I felt vaguely guilty that he was living in a place like this. Despite our recent hostility, he was a friend, I should try to find him something better.
   “Arwin?” I asked, loudly, but there was no response. “You home?”
   I approached the bathroom door, intending to knock, but then the smell hit me. The rich iron smell of fresh blood. I knew right away what had happened.
   My hand, operating on autopilot inertia, reached out and pulled open the bathroom door. I watched it creak open like I was a passenger in my own skull.

Arwin was arranged on his knees, arms cuffed behind his back, bent forward with his head thrust into the toilet. He had been gagged by some bloodsoaked cloth. The soles of his shoes were still covered with wet beach sand. There was a great deal of blood smeared and spattered everywhere, all over Arwin and the toilet and the floor and on the lip of the ancient clawfooted tub. It had just begun to dry.

I didn’t quite compute what had happened to his head at first. It looked shrunken and misshapen, and at the same time he seemed to be wearing some kind of pale baseball cap. I looked at the bloody rag dangling from the shower-curtain rail for a moment and then understanding hit, my knees buckled, and I sat down hard on the floor.

The dark rag tied to the shower rail, with the big bloody clump hanging from it, was Arwin’s long hair. He wasn’t wearing a cap. The pale bloodstreaked hemisphere I saw half-dunked in the toilet was his bare skull. Arwin had been scalped, and his scalp hung over the tub.

Five hours ago we had walked along the beach and talked. Ninety minutes ago I had spoken to him on the phone. Now he was dead. Zoltan and Zorana had somehow found him and come and killed him. Executed him, nineteenth-century style.

I pulled my cell phone from my pocket with shaking hands and pushed 911. But I didn’t initiate the call. If it got out that I was the one who had reported Arwin’s death, Zoltan and Zorana might unsuspend the death sentence that hung over us. Better to make it an anonymous tip from a pay phone, at least for now, lay low until Agent Turner found the mole.

If she found the mole. She would have to do it without Arwin’s back door. It would never open again. I was sure Zoltan and Zorana had taken Arwin’s computer, but that didn’t matter. Arwin would not have been so stupid as to write down his private key. It had died with him.
   I called the police from a pay phone across the street. I was surprised by my strong and steady voice. I thought of wiping the phone buttons clean, but my prints were probably already on the bathroom door and the hotel doors, and they weren’t on file anywhere, and anyways the cops would be able to work out from time of death that I couldn’t have been the killer. And being a suspect in Arwin’s murder was one of the least of my concerns.
   The initial shock of seeing the body had impelled a rush of cool, detached capability, the ability to calmly do what needed to be done. That ended after calling the police. I walked back down Leavenworth, dragging my feet, stumbling twice on curbs. I felt shaky and nauseous. The thick fetid air of the Tenderloin did nothing to help me forget the stench of blood. After a couple of blocks I stopped and leaned against a brick wall, breathing heavily. The gritty texture of brick against my palms steadied me a little. I tried closing my eyes, but the image of Arwin’s kneeling and mutilated corpse danced on the back of my eyelids, as if etched into my retinas. I already knew that sleep that night would be little more than a series of blood-drenched nightmares.
   I wanted to walk and keep walking, right out of San Francisco, out of this awful tangle that had become my life. I crazily envisioned calling Talena on my cell phone and having her join me, and the two of us walking south down the Peninsula, past the airport, through Silicon Valley, walking for days until we reached Santa Cruz or Big Sur or somewhere all this madness could not follow us. If such a place existed. I had my doubts.

Arwin’s death merited a two-paragraph item deep inside the Bay Area section of the Sunday Chronicle, ending with
The victim was identified as Arwin Shostakoff, an illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal record. INS records indicate that Shostakoff was deported from America in late 2001. Police refused to speculate on how he returned to the country or whether the crime was gang-related.

I crumpled the newspaper into a ball and did my best Greg Maddux impersonation. “They make him sound like some kind of lowlife gangbanger who got what he deserved,” I said, irrationally angry at the Chronicle for not having given Arwin a lengthy and balanced obituary. “He was a good guy, he was really smart, he worked hard, I don’t think he was ever violent unless you count bar fights. He was fucking funny. Was.”
   “I’m sorry,” Talena said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”
   “Fuck. Never – shit!”
   “What?”
   “I just realized. Arwin might have talked. Before they killed him. He might have told them that I talked to him on the beach. About negotiating with the FBI.”
   We stared at each other for a second, wide-eyed with panic, before Talena shook her head and smiled ruefully.
   “Now it crosses our minds,” she said. “Well, I guess he didn’t. Or we’d be having this conversation in the afterlife.”
   “Good point.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe he’s actually dead. Not in my gut. Even if I could believe he was actually dead, I couldn’t believe he was actually murdered. And even if I could believe that, there’s no way I could believe all the rest of this shit.”

Talena got up, walked behind me, and massaged my shoulder muscles, which were about as loose as concrete. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

“Was it true, what Saskia said?” I asked. “About you making a point of walking slowly across Sniper’s Alley?”

Talena nodded. “For a while,” she said. “Maybe two months, after Davor died. You met his little brother in Sarajevo, you probably don’t remember. His girlfriend – I don’t even remember her name any more, isn’t that awful? His girlfriend came to the apartment where I was staying, because I was her nearest friend to the hospital, she was just covered with his blood. She couldn’t talk. And the next day she went out and walked up and down Zmaja od Bosne until one of them shot her. Suicide by sniper. It was a head shot, at least she didn’t suffer. Anyways, after Davor, I didn’t want to die, I don’t think, but who lived and who died seemed so random, and I hated them so much, I didn’t want to scurry around like a mouse, running from them all the time. So I started doing the slow defiant walk thing. I wasn’t the only one. Lots of people did it.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Eventually they shot at me.” She smiled bleakly. “After that my self-preservation instinct took over and I ran like hell every time.”

“Hurrah for your self-preservation instinct.”

She kissed me again.

“All right,” I said. “What do you want to do today?”
   “I don’t know. I didn’t have any plans.” She sighed. “Oh, the irony. Normally it’d be great to have a whole Sunday afternoon with nothing to do but lie around together.”
   “Yeah. But, um, Friday’s no-sex stance, that still stands for awhile for me.” I was healing, but still sore and sensitive, and I had an amazing dark fist-sized bruise where Zoltan had hit me. So did Talena, but mine, as I had pointed out proudly to her in the shower, was bigger. Laughter still hurt; sex would probably be agonizing.
   “Me too. I mean,” she waved her hands dismissively, “I don’t want you worrying about me, honestly, just because with me it’s mostly psychological doesn’t mean it’s more serious than you getting your balls kicked in, but the whole ‘psycho madman ripping your clothes off and threatening to rape you and running his knife all over you before cutting your chest open’ thing, I think it might take another couple weeks before I’m real sexually comfortable again.”
   “Psycho madman?” I asked. “You think he’s crazy?”
   She thought about it for a moment. “I guess not. Evil isn’t crazy. Different things.”
   “Yeah.” I glanced at the rest of the paper and decided I wasn’t interested. “You know what? Let’s go get a drink.”
   “A – Paul, it’s not even noon yet.”
   “Well, whenever Noc Noc opens. Arwin liked that place. I owe him…I don’t know. A wake. Fuck being safe and responsible. Let’s go get Saskia and get a drink.”
   I expected Talena to object further, but, “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. Let’s blow off some steam. In case they come kill us tonight, we might as well pickle ourselves first.”
* * *
   Monday through Thursday of that week passed uneventfully. The constant unease, the unending stress, the not knowing what Agent Turner was doing or what Zoltan and Zorana planned, was a physical weight like wearing a lead coat all day long. Both Talena and I threw ourselves into work. I worked forty-eight hours those four days, even though I was only allowed to bill Autarch twenty hours for the whole week. Each night we held each other tightly until we fell asleep in one another’s arms. Even so our sleep was fitful and restless. Talena twitched and murmured desperate words of Croatian, and I often woke from nightmares in which I was back in Albania, working next to Arwin, and he seemed alive and fine, except he had been scalped and endless rivers of blood flowed down his face.
   And then, Thursday night, as we watched TV on the couch, Arwin emailed me.
   “What the hell?” I said, astonished, staring bug-eyed at my laptop.
   “What?” Talena asked, worried.
   “It’s Arwin. I just got email from Arwin!”
   “You what? From Arwin?”
   “Pretty good trick seeing as how he’s been very dead for the last five days. Get this! The subject line is Dead Man Talking!” I clicked excitedly. Had he somehow faked his own death? Had that been someone else’s body? Was Arwin alive?
From:      [email protected]
To:        [email protected]
Subject:   dead man talking
Date:      22 Aug 2003 05:00 GMT
so if you’re reading this, either i’m dead or i fucked up my dead man’s switch, and if it’s a fuckup then i’ll probably be dead soon anyway, so goodbye.
this is supposed to be triggered by an obituary with my name and birthdate appearing in my hometown paper. i got a cron job running twice a week checking its web page and if it gets a hit it sends two emails. pretty sneaky, huh?
the first email goes to the nypd and talks about some mafia guys i know in brighton beach. watch the news closely. you’ll probably hear about it.
the second email goes to you. you remember our little walk on the beach? hell, i don’t know, could be sixty years ago. sure hope so. anyway we went for a walk on the beach and i came back and looked up our mutual friend Zoltan. the shit he did is so fucked up. in case it wasn’t so long ago, and i stepped in front of a bus or a flamethrower or something, do me a favour and get the fucker.
it’s a dostoyevsky quote. and ain’t it the truth?
“i tell you that to think too much is a disease, a real actual disease.”
take care of yo’self, you ratfuck sonofabitch.
—arwin
   “God damn,” I said, bitterly disappointed, and pleased, and impressed.
   “Is he alive?” Talena scrambled over to look over my shoulder.
   “No,” I said. “No. But he gave us the key.”
   “The key to his back door? How? Oh,” she said, reading.
   “The very same,” I said. Without stopping to think I called up a new browser window and pointed it to Mycroft. “Let’s you and me open it up and break on through.”
   It wasn’t hard. After all I had built the web site myself. I directed Internet Explorer to Mycroft’s IP number, the unique Internet address I knew by heart, and the login web page I had built myself filled the screen. A couple of logins I had installed for test purposes were probably still there, but there was no point in logging in. I just added “/upload/” after the IP number in Explorer’s address bar, and seconds later, a list of every stegosaurized picture that anyone had uploaded to the system filled the screen. I hadn’t bothered securing this list. The whole point of public-key cryptography is that you don’t care if your encrypted messages are available to the whole world, because only the recipient can read them.
   But in this case, the secret message contained in each picture had been encrypted three times. Once for the intended recipient; once for Sinisa; and once for anyone who knew the pass phrase Arwin had just sent me from beyond the grave.
   There were a lot of messages. Collectively they told a fascinating story. Talena had been right, they were smuggling drugs. But there was so much more to it than that.
   Six months ago, Sinisa Obradovic had been just what he seemed, an effective but small-time smuggler who moved people into and out of the Balkans. But that wasn’t enough for him. Sinisa had ambition. Sinisa had a dream. And Sinisa had a golden opportunity hammering away on his mansion’s wrought-iron gates: the zombies.
   At first Sinisa’s zombie zoo was a simple exchange of services. They paid him with blood money for security and anonymity. But Sinisa slowly began to realize that the increasingly bored and listless zombies could be more than just dependents. That was his real genius. Anyone else would have looked at this vilest group of criminals Europe had seen since the Nuremberg trials, considered their horrific histories and outstanding arrest warrants, and seen a massive liability. Sinisa saw one of the most extraordinary economic assets on the planet. He saw a group of people capable of any kind of crime or violence, fiercely loyal to one another, sitting on a pile of ill-gotten money, and desperate to avoid capture.
   Sinisa struck a deal with them. He would get them out of the Balkans and into relative safety. They would scatter in twos and threes, each little group getting their own little Third World sub-empire, and oversee his smuggling operations for him. They were perfect for the job. A smart, competent, ruthless, tight-knit group who would never dare betray Sinisa for fear of the warrants hanging over their collective heads.
   Saskia’s dream was, just as he had said, to become the Amazon and EBay of human trafficking, to build a people-smuggling empire on which the sun would never set. He had connections. He had the zombies. And soon enough he had Mycroft, perfect secure communications, miles better than passing slips of paper with cell phone numbers on them back and forth in shady bars in Tijuana or Guangzhou or Istanbul.
   It was fascinating, reading the messages in sequence, watching Zoltan’s Latin American business grow, like time-lapse photography of a blooming flower. Further tendrils of empire were already growing around the globe. One of the reasons Sinisa had chosen Belize was its surprisingly good connections to the Orient; many Taiwanese and wealthy Chinese had purchased Belizean passports. The two visitors from Taiwan whose presence I had wondered about, Mr Chang and Mr Lee? Major snakeheads, smugglers who shipped literal boatloads of Chinese from Fujian province into America every month. Mr Chang and Mr Lee were very interested in the new route, and new communications network, that Sinisa had opened up. A pilot joint venture was due to begin next month.
   There were messages from Africans in Angola and the Congo and Liberia and the Sudan, discussing how they might move people across the Sahara and into Europe. There was talk of sending Indonesians into Australia. There were discussions of how many Moldovan women the American sex trade could handle. And his Balkans business continued to thrive, taking people from Central Asia, India, the Middle East, and bringing them to Western Europe.
   Sinisa, like the CEO he was, stayed laser-focused on his one business, people smuggling. Time and again people suggested he used his network to transport drugs, or weapons, or blood diamonds, and time and again he shot them down. Those businesses were too dangerous, too violent, too politically volatile. He did not want to find himself in the crosshairs of America’s longstanding War On Drugs or more recent War On Terrorism. That was too risky. But people smuggling was sufficiently morally ambiguous that it remained a much lower enforcement priority for Western governments. Its slightly lower profits were worth the considerably lower risk.
   But he had made one exception to that rule. Like any other startup, he had cash flow problems.You can’t build a business without capital, but neither banks nor venture capitalists offer money to smuggling syndicates. So he had reached out to his connections in Afghanistan, from which many of the clients of his Balkans business had come, and he had gotten his paws on a mountain of pure Afghani heroin with a street value approaching forty million dollars. His policy was to stay far away from drugs, but just this once, this was different. This was startup capital for a billion-dollar enterprise. “Billion”, with a “b”, as in one thousand million; that staggering sum was his long-term goal. Sinisa wanted to be the CEO of an organization with gross revenues of one billion dollars a year.
   I wondered if CEO was really the right term. Sinisa had the CEO mindset, he thought of himself as a CEO, but chief executive officers have boards, and shareholders, and they operate inside the law, carefully regulated. Sinisa worked in the last shadowy corner of this world where the feudal system reigns, knights and dukes and kings and emperors of crime. Smuggling refugees across the Balkans had made him a duke, but that wasn’t enough. On the other hand he didn’t want to be an emperor; he knew that was too much, would make him a target, like Pablo Escobar.
   The analogy got better the more I thought about it. The zombies were his Knights of the Round Table. Zoltan and Zorana were his co-Lancelots. Arwin and I had been the wizards. And Sinisa, of course, was the king.
   You should have meddled not in the affairs of wizards, King Sinisa, I advised him mentally. For as you can see, we can haunt your ass even after we are dead.
   There were only a few messages that referred specifically to me.
From: Y To: S
Subject: READ ME IMMEDIATELY
Critically important. The attached report was filed on the FBI infobase today. Balthazar Wood has reported that you are smuggling war criminals into the USA and that ZK is at large in America. This is a massive security breach and we need to deal with it immediately.
From: S To: ZZ
I have sad and disappointing news. Our ex-friend Paul Wood has found out who you are, and has talked to the FBI.
Not as bad as it sounds. The FBI cannot start pursuing you yet, but if he tells them that he saw you personally, they will begin an investigation. Of course if they do we will know about it immediately.
But that will not happen. Because you will go to Paul – who lives at 1256 Rhode Island Street, in San Francisco – and you will make it very clear to him that he will never talk to anyone about this again. You will _not_ cause any permanent damage to him or anyone else.
The timing is terrible, but remember, we only need his mouth shut for the next few weeks.
From: S To: Y
Thank you for the warning. Regardless of what happens you are _not_ to risk discovery in any way. You are more valuable than ZZ and the money combined.
Obviously we will need to find new programmers for Mycroft 2.0. A shame. Finding trustworthy people is difficult and may delay the project.
I cannot tell you how much I look forward to seeing you again.
From: ZZ To: S
Paul will never speak of us.
We have made arrangements for the sale and the flight. The agreed price is 13 million dollars. The exchange will take place at an event called Burning Man. The pilot will charge 250,000 dollars. Y reports the pilot is wanted by the FBI and desperate to get into Mexico. Tijuana arrival is scheduled for approximately 0300 on Sunday 31st August.
   “So S is Sinisa,” Talena said, near midnight, when we had finally exhausted the mysteries of Mycroft. “And ZZ is Zoltan and Zorana.”
   “It’s probably Zorana who writes them,” I said. “Her English was always better.”
   “And Y is the mole.”
   I nodded. Sinisa’s source in the FBI, the fourth and most rabid head of Cerberus, the crown jewel of his kingdom.
   “I guess ZZ are just visiting after all,” I said.
   The last message implied that Zoltan and Zorana had not come to America to live, but only because Sinisa’s criminal startup needed funds. They had brought a staggering amount of pure Afghani heroin into America, they had found a buyer, and they were going to sell it, fly the money back to Mexico, and then courier it back to Sinisa in Belize.
   I had heard of Burning Man. Some kind of counterculture arts festival in the Nevada desert held every year, in the week before Labor Day. Lots of drugs and naked people, a huge crowd of suspicious characters and distracting sights, with basically zero police presence, in the middle of the empty desert. Anything could happen at Burning Man, from the stories I’d heard, and in the chaos and confusion and drug-maddened haze, nobody would pay attention. Public enough that murder and betrayal would be difficult, but far from the reach of law enforcement. The perfect place to trade a lot of drugs for a lot of money and then fly that money south to Mexico.
   “They’ll be leaving the country in ten days,” Talena said. “And maybe not coming back.”