Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (30 page)

Unless.

“We split up,” I said. I grabbed the binoculars from Lawrence and took Talena’s hand. “Talena and Saskia come with me. Steve, Lawrence, run back to the Temple of Gravity. Make noise, draw them after you. Go. Now.”
   Without even pausing for a beat they turned and ran.

 “I have a plan,” I whispered to Talena and Saskia, as I led them perpendicular to Steve and Lawrence’s direction, further into the darkness, walking instead of running.
   Steve bellowed convincingly with pain, as if he had stubbed a toe. The spider-car swerved to pursue his voice. I smiled with relief. Zoltan and Zorana wouldn’t recognize Steve and Lawrence, and I knew that both of them could do very convincing versions of Stupid Inebriated Tourist. They would be fine.

Talena and Saskia and I walked for another few seconds, then I stopped.

“Lie down,” I whispered, and lay down next to them. “Use the mike. Find them.”

“Oh,” Talena whispered. “I understand.”

We lay so close I could see her outline against the pale playa by starlight. She aimed the shotgun mike in the general direction where the laser sight must have been in order to draw a bead on my chest, then panned it back and forth. Thankfully the wind had died down a little. The spider-car rattled past, within a hundred feet, but Zoltan and Zorana were too intent on pursuing Steve and Lawrence to notice us.
   “I hear something,” Talena whispered. “They’re talking. Must have radios or walkie-talkies. Two men, with different accents. They say they can’t see anything out here. They just agreed to something.” Then, “I can hear their footsteps.”
   She slowly rotated the shotgun mike towards the Man, listening. I looked over to the spider-car and saw it moving fast, past the Temple of Gravity, towards Black Rock City. Steve and Lawrence had either eluded the Couple From Hell or convinced them of their harmlessness.
   “Perfect,” I whispered. “Now we follow them.”
   It wasn’t difficult. We were far out of their earshot, but thanks to the mike, they were well within ours. When they reached 2:30 and the Esplanade, we saw them by the light of the huge rave camps there. Both of them carried poster tubes slung over their shoulders, tubes which I supposed contained their guns. One of them was a skinny Latino man, presumably the pilot who would fly them to Mexico, wearing a long white fake-fur coat open over a thong swimsuit. The other was a tall, wiry blond man with a ponytail, shirtless, in track pants and sandals. Saskia and I recognized him immediately. Sinisa Obradovic. Both of us gasped.
   “That’s him,” I murmured to Talena. “Sinisa. You remember?”
   “I remember,” she said.
   “Why is he here?” Saskia asked. She sounded frightened.

I shook my head. I wasn’t happy to see him either. Dealing with Zoltan and Zorana was bad enough. Sinisa’s presence was an unexpected blow. Our enemies were more numerous and more dangerous than anticipated.

We followed them to a big rented Winnebago at 2:30 and Faith. They entered the Winnebago and didn’t come out again. We sat beneath somebody’s shade structure fifty feet away and watched. I wondered why the king of the criminals himself had blessed Burning Man with his presence. I guessed this drug deal was so important to his organization that he didn’t want to delegate.

We were exhausted, but fortunately it was too cold to fall asleep. A thin streak of dawn began to stain the eastern sky. I had started to wonder if Zoltan and Zorana were camping separately when the spider-car finally rolled up.
   We watched Zoltan and Zorana roust Sinisa and the Mexican from bed, open the spider-car’s trunk, and transfer the wooden crate full of money into the Winnebago. It was so heavy it took all four of them to lift it. Sinisa drove the spider-car away, and the other three retreated into the Winnebago. The sun had begun to warm the desert air by the time Sinisa returned and, yawning, climbed into the Winnebago and shut the door. We waited another twenty minutes just to be sure, but there was no more movement, no more noise.
   We knew where they lived.

“It is still not easy,” Saskia said, at breakfast the next morning. “We have surprise, but they have weapons. They are very dangerous. I was thinking, perhaps we could use your tear gas to drive them from their vehicle, then take them as they exit, but now I think they are too dangerous. I think we must attack their vehicle as they sleep. I think we must burn it.”
   She sounded intent but calm, as if arguing some interesting philosophical point, rather than planning the deaths of four people. I stared bemusedly at her. The meek and terrified woman I had first met had transformed into a decisive general. I supposed Saskia had been like this in the years when she fought for Sarajevo and protected Talena, before seven years of Dragan’s inescapable abuse reduced her to cringing timidity.
   “So you’re planning to murder them in their sleep,” Lawrence said.
   Talena and I looked at each other uncomfortably and didn’t say anything.
   Steve shook his head. “Whatever you figure on doing, mate, we’re in your corner, you know that. But walking up to their camp tonight and setting up a propane bomb or something like…I’ll put one together if you ask, and I’m sure they deserve it, but I don’t mind saying it’ll leave a bad taste.”
   “Likewise,” Lawrence said. “Maybe I’ve seen too many Westerns, but that just feels wrong.”
   “Yeah,” I said. “It’s wrong. I know that. We know that. But what the fuck else do we do? You’d rather we woke them up and challenged them to a duel?”
   “No, wait, let me guess,” Talena said. “You’d rather we just let them go. Let them fly back to Mexico with thirteen million dollars for war criminals. After what they did to us, after what they did to my home, we just let them go.”

“Not exactly,” Lawrence said.

“Then what?”

“Let them live. Wait for the FBI to catch the mouse in their house. Come visit London for a few months while they clean up. You’ve still got that crystal ball that lets you read their secret messages. When they come back, you have a whole FBI welcoming committee waiting for them.”

“Let them go and catch them when they come back.” I shook my head. “Sorry. No. If they get to Mexico I don’t think they’ll come back at all. Especially if their friend in the FBI gets busted. They’ll stay out of the country for good. Besides, we can’t come to London. We’ve got Saskia to worry about. She can’t leave the country. And we can’t afford to go on the run while the FBI cleans house.”

A gloomy silence followed. But it was brief. Steve and Lawrence looked at one another, and diabolical smiles began to spread across their faces.

“Well now,” Steve said. “Lawrence and me had a little talk last night, hypothetical like, figured this might be where things were going. We came up with a bit of a plan. We reckon maybe there’s one little thing we can do to get them a bit shirty at us, make sure they come back in a hurry, maybe not leave at all.”

“One little thing,” Lawrence agreed.

Talena looked wary. “What one little thing?”

Steve and Lawrence grinned at one another, obviously savouring the moment, and then Steve said, “We nick the money.”

My mouth fell open.

“Steal the money?” Saskia asked. “Yes, but how?”

“It’s funny you should ask,” Lawrence said. “I happen to have a cunning plan.”
* * *
   The money we intended to steal was very heavy, locked inside a Winnebago, and guarded by four criminals, all of them presumably paranoid, trigger-happy, and heavily armed. The casual observer might think that we had to first gain access to the Winnebago, then somehow separate the money from its guardians, and finally lug the money to our getaway vehicle. But the casual observer did not have Lawrence’s evilly brilliant mind.
   Zoltan had parked the spider-car some distance away from the Winnebago in order to avoid discovery. Sinisa was presumably worried that the denizens of Smack Dealer Camp might attempt to recover the money now that they had his heroin, and figured that his new vehicle was too easy to find, maybe bugged with a location transmitter, and wasn’t needed now that the money was safely in the Winnebago that would carry it to his getaway plane. Fortunately, even at Burning Man, the spider-car’s high production values stood out, and it didn’t take us long to find it parked between two stoner camps near 4:30 and Faith. Their denizens took the late-afternoon appearance of Steve, Talena, and I, and our excuse that we had lost the keys, in stride. A few of them clustered around as Steve broke into the car and began working under the steering wheel.

“That’s a totally amazing art car, dude,” a blond, bearded, bong-wielding man said. “It’s just, like, beautiful.” His friends and neighbours nodded and offered us bong hits. We politely declined.

When Steve’s automotive refurbishment was finished, he covered the traces of his forced access as best he could, relocked the door, and went to relieve Lawrence at the Winnebago stakeout. Talena and I didn’t dare go on lookout for fear of being spotted, but the Couple From Hell still didn’t know that Steve and Lawrence were associated with us. Saskia made dinner for the rest of us, freeze-dried beef stroganoff with granola bars for dessert, and we went over the finer points of our plan.

 We waited until an hour past sunset, when it was fully dark.
   None of the subjects of our surveillance had left the Winnebago since we had begun watching at three in the afternoon. Apparently they had decided that their share of the thirteen million dollars was worth missing all of Burning Man’s frenetic final weekend. As thirty thousand people danced, drank, whooped, hollered, ingested massive quantities of illegal drugs, had sex, and/or sampled the many delights of the Esplanade in this last night before the Man burned, Sinisa, Zoltan, Zorana, and the Mexican, christened the “Fearsome Foursome” by Lawrence, played cards and drank beer; and Lawrence, Saskia, Talena and I watched them. Watched them and watched Steve as he lay beneath the Winnebago for a good twenty minutes, working with his skilled hands and a sharp knife.
   “That was a good little engine under there,” he said sadly when he returned to our discreet shelter between two tents of a nearby camp abandoned for the evening. “And that chemical loo was tidy little piece of work. Ripping it all up, that wasn’t right.” He seemed genuinely repentant, as if he had committed some sort of mechanical sin and was now doomed to engineering hell.
   “Here we go,” Talena said sharply, watching through the binoculars. “Zoltan’s going for the toilet.”
   “That didn’t take long,” Lawrence said. “Hope they’re drinking a lot of beer in there. And they all ate some bad enchiladas last night.”
   The cry of dismay was easily audible without the shotgun mike.
   “Beautiful,” Lawrence said. “Backed up like a charm. Well done, mate.”
   He clapped Steve on the shoulder. Steve grunted sourly, unhappy at being praised for fouling up perfectly good machinery.
   There was a brief and high-volume discussion inside the Winnebago, and then the door banged open and Zoltan and Sinisa went outside to inspect the chemical toilet. After they left the well-lit doorway all we could see was two flashlights disappear around the back of the Winnebago, then drop down to near playa level, aimed up at the newly wrecked Winnebago.

The lights hung utterly still for a moment. Then both flashlights flickered off. Sinisa shouted something in Serbian and a moment later Zorana turned off the Winnebago’s interior lights. There was just enough ambient light, we were just barely close enough, to see motion in front of the Winnebago as Zoltan and Sinisa returned to the front. There they stopped and Sinisa and Zorana had a brief and tense conversation in Serbian, which ended, according to Talena, with Sinisa ordering Zorana to be quiet and let him think.
   After that there was a long silence.

 I knew what Sinisa was thinking. Either this was random vandalism – not at all likely – or somebody was after them. Somebody who didn’t act like the police. There would be two possibilities uppermost in his mind: either Smack Dealer Camp wanted to have their drugs and keep their money too, or Talena and I were trying to wreak revenge.

 I was sure what he wanted to do was venture out from the Winnebago and search the neighbourhood for his watchers. But he feared being lured away from the money. The treasure chest within the Winnebago was like an anchor, limiting him to only two choices; stay with the money, or carry the money away.
   If it was Smack Dealer Camp, then the denizens of the Winnebago were outnumbered and outgunned and should try to get away while they could. If it was Talena and I, this was some kind of trick and they should stay where they were. Our plan relied on Sinisa not taking Talena and I seriously, and on him being a man of action who would rather do something active than passively wait. Especially if passively waiting meant spending the next twenty-four hours in a Winnebago that now reeked of shit.
   “I will be back soon,” Sinisa said, in English, and broke into a run, heading towards 4:00 and Faith. Towards the spider-car. Perfect.

We waited. In the distance, huge columns of flame leapt up from the Esplanade, some new uber-flamethrower capable of launching curling gouts of fire some eighty feet into the sky, cuing roars of applause. The show had just ended when the spider-car appeared. We watched as Sinisa climbed out, barking orders in Serbian.

Soon Zoltan, Sinisa, and the Mexican staggered beneath the burden of the crate full of money, grunting and groaning, while Zorana covered them from the doorway of the Winnebago with a rifle more than three feet long. I idly passed the time by trying to guess how much the money weighed. I knew a dollar bill weighed about one gram, so if it was all in hundreds, then that crate contained some three hundred pounds of money.

Finally, after twice dropping it, they got the money into the trunk. Zoltan and the Mexican got into the front of the spider-car, the Mexican in the driver’s seat. Sinisa and Zorana got into the back, an awkward fit with their rifles slung over their shoulders.
   “Perfect,” Lawrence said, with authorial pride. His plan had deceived our enemies to such an extent that they had actually carried the money out of the Winnebago and into our getaway vehicle for us, eliminating the weight-of-thirteen-million-cash-dollars problem. Now all we had to do was take custody of the said vehicle.
A trivial problem. We waited until all four of them were in the car and the doors were shut. The engine roared to life, the headlights lit up, and Talena took one of the two walkie-talkies we had borrowed from the Hatter and pushed the red Push-To-Talk button.

The other borrowed walkie-talkie was duct-taped beneath the front seat of the spider-car, wired to a canister of the tear gas we had purchased at the International Spy Shop. Steve’s work was as reliable as ever. Alarmed voices from inside the custom Beetle quickly morphed into a plaintive cacophony of hoarse, choking cries. A few seconds later, four figures climbed blindly and spastically out of the spider-car and staggered towards fresh air, clutching at their eyes as if they wanted to tear them out.
   Lawrence had already strapped on the gas mask, purchased with the tear gas as part of a set, and he sprinted towards the Beetle like he was going for Olympic gold. In fact there was no need for speed. All four of the tear-gas victims still moaned and thrashed with pain, on their knees or doubled over, coughing from their gut, hands over their burning eyes, barely able to hold onto their guns, completely unaware that Lawrence was commandeering the vehicle they had just vacated. The Mexican had had the presence of mind to remove the key, but Steve had rewired the spider-car’s ignition so that once the engine started it could not easily be stopped. Lawrence reversed the arachnidized Beetle away from the Winnebago and onto Faith Street, then accelerated away, violating Burning Man’s speed limit and going up to maybe fifteen miles an hour. After five days in Black Rock City, that seemed terrifyingly fast. By the time its four previous inhabitants were on their feet, the spider-car and its cargo of thirteen million dollars had vanished in a cloud of playa dust.
   Up to that point the plan had worked perfectly. Talena and Saskia and Steve and I were triumphant. We thought we had won. All we had to do now was sidle off to the Esplanade, disappear into the crowds, go back to our camp, rendezvous with Lawrence, transfer the money into our Chevy Malibu, and get the hell out of Dodge.
   If only we had known that they could see in the dark.
   We had watched the excitement from a camp about a hundred feet away from the Winnebago, in the middle of the block. We had a fairly clear view, but there were several camps between us and the distance between was partially interrupted by vehicles, tents, shade structures, rebar-anchored guy lines, solar showers, the usual detritus of the back streets of Black Rock City. Steve and Talena and Saskia and I stood and began to slowly and quietly walk away, confident that we were safe. We were wrapped in a blanket of darkness, surrounded on all sides by visual distractions, indistinguishable from innocent passersby.
   But there were no other passersby. And when we stood from behind the tents that had sheltered us, Zorana, blinking her eyes clear of tear gas, looked through the scope on her grotesquely huge rifle, a scope that exemplified the finest in American military technofetishism, featuring both nightvision and heatvision, and saw the three of us walking away.

We had been lucky when we had witnessed the drugs-for-money exchange in the playa last night, lucky that the wind and thick whirling dust had obscured both starlight and heat, that they had been distracted by the scrambling figures of Steve and Lawrence, lucky that Talena and Saskia and I had not been seen as we lay prone and tracked them with our shotgun mike. Our luck had run out.
   We didn’t know any of this at the time. All we knew was that four flashlights were trained on us, and then the lights were jostling up and down and growing brighter as they sprinted towards us. We hesitated for what might have been a fatal second before turning and trying to flee.
   We probably didn’t have a chance in a foot race anyway. Our pursuers were fit and fast and furious. Our only hope was to make it into a crowd of people before they caught us. And that hope died about three seconds into the chase when Talena, running next to me, tripped on a rebar tent pole and slammed face-first into the ground.
   Time slowed to a glacial crawl. I felt like I was moving in slow motion, like the Six Million Dollar Man, as Steve and Saskia and I screeched to a halt and turned to help her. Talena tried to get up, but the fall had stunned her and she couldn’t find her footing. Behind her, maybe forty feet away, four darting flashlights were closing and converging on us.