Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (26 page)

   “None of this really helps, does it?” I asked. I wanted to hit something, spend an hour beating up on punching bags, but I knew that even if I did, I would find this hard reality no less infuriating. “We know exactly what they’re doing and we can’t do a thing about it. We have to sit back and do nothing, because Agent Turner has to be all slow and quiet to find whoever the fuck Y is, and I don’t think all this shit we just read is really going to help her that much. If she tries to do anything to stop them, they’ll find out. She’s not going to find Y in the next ten days. They’re going to get thirteen million dollars for Sinisa and his zombie buddies, and then they’re going to get away, and we can’t do fuck-all.”
* * *
   I woke unusually early the next morning, just past dawn. I tried to fall back asleep but couldn’t. Eventually I surrendered to wakefulness and padded to the shower. When I came out, a damp towel wrapped around my waist, Talena was up.
   “I’m tired,” she said, “but I can’t sleep.”
   “Me too. Doesn’t it suck.”
   I dressed and prepared coffee and bagels as she showered. I wanted to read the paper, but we hadn’t arranged for delivery yet, it was a six-block walk to the nearest newspaper box, and I wasn’t ready to face the world outside.
   Talena pulled on underwear and a Ramones T-shirt and sat at the kitchen table with me. The same kitchen table she had bled on, when Zoltan and Zorana had attacked us.
   “Tell me something,” she said. “Does this place feel like home to you?”
   “It might have someday if it wasn’t for them,” I said.
   “Yeah. For me too.”
   We looked at each other.
   “Does anyplace feel like home?” she asked.
   I said, “I don’t know. Not really.”
   “Huh.” She sipped her coffee. After a moment she said, “That’s not a real reassuring answer.”
   “Not reassuring how?” I asked cautiously.
   “For, like, the future. You know. Our future.”
   I decided it was wisest to wait for her to explain.
   “I didn’t sleep much,” Talena said. “Tossing and turning and thinking. If we don’t do anything, then what do we do? You know? Get married and have kids?” I twitched. “Relax, Paul, I’m speculating, not proposing. You don’t feel like you belong anywhere. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. So what the hell do we do? Try and settle down and have a normal life and forget that we didn’t do anything?”
   “I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean, didn’t do anything? We’ve done lots –”
   “I mean, about them.”
   “About them? I…I thought we agreed we can’t do anything.”
   “No. Agent Turner can’t do anything. We could do something. We could go to Burning Man ourselves, try to find them, try to fuck up their plan.”
   I looked at her for a long time.
   “You’re serious,” I said.
   “Like a bullet. Like a heart attack. Yeah, I’m serious. Paul, these people, not just Zoltan and Zorana, them too, but the people the money will go to – besides what they did to us, these are the people who destroyed, slaughtered…ravaged…my city, my country, my family, my friends, my home. Honestly, this may sound crazy, but honestly, I was thinking about it, and if we died and they all died, I swear to God, I would call that a fair trade.”
   “Talena,” I said. “Please. Do not get all martyrish. I’m very sorry, but I am not going to let you die on me.”
   “I’m not about to strap on a suicide vest and go bomb them,” she said. “But…I don’t know. Do you want to sit here and be safe? If you call this safe, knowing they might change their minds someday and decide to off all us witnesses? I remember you said you wanted them dead. You said you would kill them yourself.”
   “I would,” I said.
   That hadn’t been a thin emotional flash. I was still willing, still eager. I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. They had tortured, raped, and murdered scores of people, had come into my home, beaten me to a pulp, tormented and cut and scarred the woman I loved. Would killing them be justice? Who cared? We were way past justice. I wanted revenge so badly that my hands shook and I groaned audibly whenever I thought of Zoltan smiling and caressing Talena’s naked body with the point of his knife.
   We knew where they were going. Burning Man. Talena was right. They were going there because it was the perfect place for a drug deal, the perfect place for a getaway, a place where anything could happen and no one would notice. And that also made it the perfect place for an ambush. But was I willing to risk my life, and more importantly Talena’s life, for my revenge? Even if, maybe especially if, Talena wanted it even worse than I did?
   “This is crazy,” I said. “You want to go, just you and me, to somehow stop two incredibly dangerous mass murderers from doing a multimillion-dollar drug deal. To kill them, if we can. Am I hearing you correctly?”
   “Maybe your friends would help. Steve and Lawrence.”
   “They probably would. That’s not the point. Yes, I want them dead. Yes, I would kill them myself. No, I don’t want to sit back and let them get away. But there has to be some other way of doing it than us going in like vigilantes. I mean, who are we? We…This isn’t our job. I don’t know whose it is, but this isn’t our job. We’ve done enough.”
   “If not us, then who? They’ll be gone in ten days. We have to do something, Paul. Somebody has to do something. And there’s nobody but us.”
   She was right. The FBI were hamstrung by Sinisa’s mole. Even if we could notify the police, even if they believed us, the odds of them stopping anything at Burning Man, without the mole finding out, were on the wrong side of slim and none.
   The hard truth was that nobody would do anything unless we did something.
   “I’ll go,” I said. “Steve and Lawrence and I. Not you.” I searched for a reason. “We’ll need someone to coordinate things from outside, who we can call if we need –”
   “No. Paul, I am not your little princess on a pedestal who you go home to and build walls around. I’m your partner in crime. What we do, we do together.”
   We looked at each other for a few seconds.
   “All right,” I said, fearing as the words left my mouth that I would regret them for the rest of my life, that something terrible would happen to Talena out there in the desert.
   “All right?”
   “All right.”
   We looked at one another. Talena smiled.
   “You know, I always wanted to go to Burning Man,” she said. “It might even be fun.”
   “I sure hope so,” I said. “God knows we need a vacation.”

We reached Pyramid Lake at sunset, as the dying sun illuminated the landscape with dark and shimmering shades of red, instilling with unearthly beauty the mirror-still water, the single central island that gave the lake its name, the pale flat striated desert that surrounded us. The single ribbon of black road looked like a wound, as if the earth’s blood had thickened and dried into asphalt. The distant ridge to our east glittered like it was full of rubies. Its twin to the west was shrouded in shadow. Ominous, slow-thumping industrial music boomed from the car stereo.
   “Bit like home, this,” Steve said. “Except there’d be more dead roos on the road.”
   “It is like Australia,” Lawrence agreed. “Nice aesthetics, but a little light on survivability. In a state populated by lawless gambling addicts. The similarities are striking.”
   “There’s heaps more gambling here than home. We don’t have pokies in petrol stations. I don’t reckon Australians would stand for that.”
   “No, you’d insist on sitting, wouldn’t you? Lazy bastards.”
   I grinned. It was good to have my friends with me. Steve, the mountainous blond Australian, mechanic extraordinaire, tough-as-titanium ex-con and one of nicest guys in the world, who talked slowly and with small words but was smarter than he seemed. Lawrence, the wiry hard-drinking New Zealander, sharp as a scalpel, not quite the cynical misanthrope he acted. Friends, blood brothers, members of my tribe. Saskia sat to their left, behind me.
   “I hope we haven’t forgotten anything critical,” Talena said.
   “You’ve got the tickets?” I asked.
   She nodded.
   “How about the good sense God gave you?” Lawrence asked. “You seem to have mislaid that some time before we showed up.”
   “What do you want us to do?” Talena asked. “We know what we’re doing is stupid and dangerous. But tell us what else we can possibly do. Sit around and do nothing and let them get away with everything? Go to the police and have their friend in the FBI find out all about it and warn them? Do you have a third choice, Lawrence? Because those two don’t fly.”
   An uncomfortable silence fell.
   “I’m sorry,” Talena said. “Lawrence, I’m sorry. You’re doing us a huge favour just being here. I know that. I’m being rude because I’m stressed. I apologize.”
   “No worries,” Lawrence said. “Between the Brady bill and imminent mortal danger, you’ve got a right to vent. I do hear you. I just can’t help thinking that there must be someone else who can deal with this Zoltan.”
   “I wish there was,” I said. “Believe me. But there isn’t.”
   “Brady bill?” Saskia asked, puzzled.
   “The reason we don’t have guns,” Talena explained. “Federal law. Ten-day waiting period between asking for one and getting one.” She sighed. “It’s a good law. Tells you something about how fucked up our life has become that I’m complaining about the Brady bill.”
   “I thought cheap and widely available machines of death were an inalienable constitutional right in America,” Lawrence said. “Can’t you buy one on the black market?”
   I shrugged. “Maybe in Tangiers or Jo’burg or Bangkok. But here, I’m a white-bread computer programmer and she’s an editor. I don’t think we know anyone who even has a criminal record, much less anyone who can connect us to an illegal gun.” I paused for a second and thought of Arwin. “At least nobody who’s still alive.”

 “I wish old Hallam was here,” Steve said.
   “Me too,” Lawrence said.

I nodded my agreement. Back when Steve and Lawrence and I had met, back when we had trucked across half of Africa, Hallam had been our driver and leader. When we had faced down a killer in Morocco, it was Hallam who had won the battle. But his adventuring days were over; he and his wife Nicole now had two infant children.

I pulled into the left lane and passed a bus overloaded with boxes and bags duct-taped onto the roof. The back was adorned with huge Om and Peace and Burning Man sigils, and the entire left side of the bus was a huge mural of a galactic firedancer using the stars as his fuel. The sun had almost set, and the headlights of the dense chain of BM-bound vehicles stitched an endless line through the night. I knew from their web site that they were expecting more than thirty thousand attendees.
   We drove deep into the desert for another hour, through Indian reservations, past tiny towns whose very existence was mysterious, until we reached Empire, the second last town before Burning Man. By this time it was fully dark. Empire had a population of about 100 and vanished behind us in a flash. We went up and over a hill. As we crested the top, I caught my breath.
   “Crikey,” Steve said.
   Gerlach, the last town, was only a handful of small buildings. But beyond, amidst the velvet darkness of the desert, we saw ten thousand twinkling electric lights, arranged in a horseshoe shape a good quarter of a mile thick with an interior diameter of a mile. In the center of the horseshoe, clearly visible although we were at least ten miles away, loomed the stylized figure of a man, his neon bones glowing bright blue, rising at least a hundred feet above the desert. Our first view of Black Rock City, and of the Man.
   Two days earlier I had paid one thousand cash dollars to a heavily tattooed woman in a hipper-and-freakier-than-thou body modification shop in the Lower Haight, and in exchange received five Burning Man tickets. The survival guides that came with the tickets made it clear that Burning Man, held in Nevada’s barren Black Rock Desert, was very much a Bring Your Own event. Participants were required to bring, at the very least, their own food, water, shelter, bedding, clothing, garbage disposal, sunscreen, and “an open mind and a positive attitude.”

The next day we picked up Steve and Lawrence at the airport, drove six hours through heavy traffic to Reno, and went on a massive shopping binge at the local 24-hour Wal-Mart. By the time we finished, both my MasterCard and our rented Chevy Malibu wheezed and groaned beneath their new loads. We bought tents, sleeping bags, camp cookware, food, hats, sunglasses, toiletries, camping tools, and whatever other sundries looked potentially useful for a seven-day stay in the desert, a counterculture arts festival, and/or a pitched battle with international war criminals and multimillionaire drug dealers.

* * *

   Past Gerlach we followed the slow-trickling line of vehicles off paved road and onto the desert, along a trail marked with orange cones. A sign at the turnoff warned us that Burning Man’s speed limit was 5 miles per hour. I could see why. While the Black Rock Desert, actually an endless monochrome sea of pale gray, was absolutely flat, a dream to drive on, the top layer was talcum-fine dust that rose and hung in head-high clouds all around our teeming convoy.
   We eased our way through stop-and-go traffic towards the blue figure of the Man. About the only thing I already knew about Burning Man was that the week-long event culminated with the burning of that colossal figure. The road was marked with orange cones and lined with signs. The first said:

 BURNING MAN IS A SELF-SERVICE CULT. WASH YOUR OWN BRAIN.
   It took another half hour to get to the Gate, where our greeter, a pretty blonde Southern girl wearing an orange vest and a deer-antler headdress, took our tickets and gave us glossy maps of Black Rock City and thick booklets called WhatWhereWhen that listed Burning Man’s many semi-scheduled events.
   “Where do we camp?” I asked.
   “Depends. Are y’all part of a theme camp?”
   After a pause Talena admitted, “We don’t even know what a theme camp is.”
   She laughed. “Virgins! I knew it. Just camp anyplace that’s free and doesn’t have a Reserved sign. Otherwise, round here it’s first come, first serve.”
   She waved us on. I shifted our trusty Chevy Malibu into first gear and allowed it to drift forward. Our windows were open and we could taste the bone-dry air and the fine alkaline dust that permeated it. In the distance we heard rattling techno music. The electric-blue neon skeleton of the Man loomed ahead of us, his arms by his side, and in the city that surrounded him, other lights whirled and flickered, too distant to be deciphered. I had not expected so much electricity. Later I learned that most of the larger camps brought massive truck-mounted generators.

Far ahead, a gout of flame leapt at least thirty feet into the sky. A second later its shuddering roar tore through the air. We reached the outer road of the city, the edge of a colossal ragged forest of tents and RVs. A street sign told us we were at the corner of Vision and 6:30. Our headlights splashed over four people walking past. Two men and two women, thirtysomething. The women wore tribal-patterned body paint, thongs, boots, fairy wings, and nothing else. One of the men wore jeans and a black T-shirt. The other was naked but for a horned gorilla mask and various tattoos. At the intersection ahead of us a twenty-foot-high banana on wheels crossed from left to right. There were a dozen people riding on it.

“Toto,” Lawrence said, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.”
   We drove aimlessly around Black Rock City for awhile, getting the lay of the land. I quickly decided that the other reason for Burning Man’s speed limit was because if you went faster than five miles an hour you encountered so much sensory stimulation that your brain might explode.
   The outer district of the city was mostly tents and RVs, but as we moved in towards the inner edge of the horseshoe-shaped city, towards the Man, we drifted past geodesic domes, circus tents, multi-story wooden buildings, painted and draped in bright colours. It was hard to imagine that just a few days ago this had all been barren desert, and would be again in a week. We heard a half-dozen types of distant music, and an occasional flamethrower roar. We passed a car with a glowing pink ten-foot-diameter dreadlocked head mounted above it on steel rods.

Gaggles of people drifted past, dressed in flashy clubwear, body paint, elaborate costumes, nothing at all, or some combination of all four. I aimed for the inside edge of the city, which boasted the biggest and brightest structures, but when we were a block away a purple-haired man warned us “Dude, no driving on the Esplanade unless you’re an art car!”, and we retreated. Shortly afterwards, we stumbled across a colossal, brightly lit, many-pillared tent festooned with flags and banners, with its own ring road around it, midway between the Man and the Gate.

“Center Camp Café,” Lawrence reported, looking at his map. They were the first words, other than soft expostulations of amazement, that any of us had spoken for some tme.

I pulled over and looked at my own map. Black Rock City looked like a one-third-eaten donut centered around the Man. The city’s inner edge was the Esplanade. Nine other streets, this year named Authority, Creed, Dogma, Evidence, Faith, Gospel, Reality, Theory and Vision, marched concentrically outwards from the Esplanade. They in turn were carved into blocks by seventeen radial streets, like spokes from a wheel, with the Man as the hub. The spoke streets had clock coordinates, with Center Camp at 6:00 and the bitten edges of the donut at 2:00 and 10:00.
   “I think I am dreaming,” Saskia said, as a woman walked past wearing an enormous hoop dress made entirely of plastic sporks, chatting to a man painted gold.
   “No,” Lawrence said. “This place is much weirder than any dream I’ve ever had.”
   “We should find a campsite,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

“Yes,” Talena said. “And it’s an amazing place but let’s remember we’re here on business.”

I paused a moment to absorb that. For a moment, in the face of Burning Man’s overwhelming kaleidoscopic strangeness, I had lost track of why we were here.
   “I can’t believe we forgot a hammer,” Talena said, disgusted.

“This tent isn’t going anywhere unless a hurricane hits,” I pointed out. “Not with all that water in it.”

“But it’s all collapsed and squishy.”

I looked at her. “Did you say ‘squishy’? Did you buy a Jello tent when I wasn’t looking?”

She started to laugh. “Well, it feels squishy.”

“Somebody here call for a hammer?” Lawrence asked, hefting one as he approached, one hand concealed behind his back.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, amazed.

“Our neighbour in the trailer on the corner. Anders. Swedish bloke, very interesting, worked all around the world on the merchant marine. He pointed out that we forgot something absolutely critical. Something more important than water. Rivalling oxygen.”

“What is that?” Saskia asked.

I, who had known Lawrence a long time, saw the punch line coming and grinned.

“Beer,” he said, revealing a six-pack of Michelob. “Fortunately our man Anders is the generous type. Drink, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we will wish to die.”
   Our camp’s four tents – three for sleeping, one for storage – were soon fully erected and we sat crosslegged on the desert, newly aware of important things we had forgotten to bring. Seats, for one, as the ground was hard and uncomfortable, a thin layer of dust over a base baked to nearly the consistency of brick. And we were the only camp in sight without any kind of shade structure to escape the blistering daylight sun.

“No worries,” Steve said. “We’ll rig something up. But right now I wouldn’t mind going for a bit of a walkabout.”

“Me too,” I said. “Anybody else?”

We were all tired, Steve and Lawrence were still jet-lagged, but all five of us set out on foot to explore. We walked down 5:00 towards the Man. A UFO on wheels passed us, lights blinking. When we finally reached the Esplanade, we all stopped and gaped, as the sheer scale of Black Rock City became apparent for the first time.

The Esplanade, from dusk until dawn the world’s largest party zone, was lined by Burning Man’s brightest and flashiest camps and compounds. We stood near a full-size pirate ship, a pillared Roman temple, a huge video projection screen, and a palatial Arabian tent. The moon was nearly new, but the Esplanade’s three-mile arc was lit by neon signs, thousand-watt lights, bonfires, laser beams, video projections, illuminated art, firedancers, flashlights, flamethrowers, and the ten thousand glowsticks carried by the seething crowds. Huge rave camps blasted psychedelic trance for thousands of dancers. Firedancers and live bands and stilt walkers and glassblowers and video artists performed. Dozens of improvised bars helped quench dusty and thirsty throats.

The mile-wide disc of desert surrounded by the Esplanade, the area around the Man, was uninhabited but far from barren. Busy walkways marked the 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 routes to the Man, lit by kerosene lamps hanging from paired rows of 15-foot wooden pillars. The rest of the space was crisscrossed by art cars large and small, carrying the teeming partying masses from one distraction to the next. There was a reticulated bus that had been transformed into a whale. There was an Egyptian chariot drawn by a motorcycle. There was a fire-breathing dragon the length of a tractor trailor. And dozens of others, too distant to be seen in detail.