Blood Trust

TWENTY-EIGHT

“VERA, YOU’RE a chip off the old block.”

“A heart like black ice.” Vera crossed one leg over the other. “Like my new shoes?”

Carson didn’t bother looking; he knew his daughter’s tastes all too well. “Tell me about today.”

Vera’s smirk widened. “Let’s see, what happened? Oh, yes, my lover, Andy Gunn, recruited me to help him terminate two lowlifes.”

“Names, Vera, names.”

“Willowicz—though Gunn referred to him as Blunt—and O’Banion.”

Carson wet his lips. “They’re both dead? You’re sure?”

“Could not be deader.” Vera watched his profile, which was vexingly noncommittal. “Why?”

“I’m wondering why he killed them and why now.”

“He was very focused, I can tell you that. Like he’d been given a deadline.”

“Odds are he had been. He’s taking orders from someone other than me.”

“But you knew that already.”

“Yes, but not who he’s playing both sides with.” Carson seemed to be staring at nothing and everything at once. “I had him followed, but he slipped the tail. He must have gone to meet with the person who gave him today’s marching orders.”

“Any ideas who it might be?”

“That’s something you’re going to find out for me.”

Vera closed her eyes for a moment. “Listen, you fixed me up at Fearington so I’d become Alli Carson’s roommate. Alli knew Caroline. You thought Alli might know where she is; she doesn’t. No one knows where that bitch has got to.”

“Don’t call your half sister that,” Carson said sharply. “You haven’t earned the right.”

“She left, just like that. We shared so many things, and then poof she was gone. And after that she never contacted me.”

“She never contacted anyone.”

Vera clenched her fists. “This is all your fault, you shithead.”

“Down, girl. You should see a doctor about that overabundance of testosterone.”

“Ha ha.” There was little mirth in Vera’s voice. “Only if you come with me to see about your satyriasis.”

“Now who’s the bitch.”

“Neither of us can help it, that’s the way you made us.”

Carson made a derisive sound. “Oh, yes, blame it all on Daddy.”

She turned to him, draped one leg over his lap, snuggled up to him, and said in a little-girl-porn voice, “Oh, Daddy, I’m just worried about you, is all. I don’t want you to go into cardiac arrest while you’re plowing away.”

“Vera.” His tone held an unmistakable note of warning.

“So many furrows, so little time.” Her fingers traced the whorls of his ear. “I know, Daddy, time is running out, soon enough you won’t be able to get it up at all.”

“Godammit, Vera!” He pushed her roughly away from him. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Nothing a little parental love wouldn’t cure.” She gave him a mock-pout from her corner of the seat.

“Bullshit. You wouldn’t know what to do with parental love.”

“Good thing,” she said, “because you don’t know how to show it.”

This exchange was followed by an oppressive silence.

Finally, she said, “You asked me to get close to Andy. We both knew what that meant, so when you think about it, you’ve been pimping me out.”

“I’m doing what any good spymaster would do, keeping an eye on my people.”

“If you give yourself any more credit I’ll throw up.”

“Don’t get superior. I’m not the whore in this scenario.”

“That’s really how you see me, isn’t it?”

He turned away, but remained silent.

Vera spent several minutes fantasizing about punching him in the face. “Why are you expending so much energy on trying to find Caro, anyway?”

“Why do you think? She’s my daughter.”

“Now who’s bullshitting, Daddy? Caro’s a thing. She ran away from you, so you couldn’t have her.”

“Oh, please!”

“As opposed to me, who ran right back into your arms.” The vulpine smirk returned to Vera’s face. “Caro is someone neither your wealth nor your influence can affect. That’s something you simply can’t tolerate, Daddy.”

“Not true.”

“Of course it’s true. You think I don’t know you. You’re so fucking defended a fucking termite couldn’t get in, that’s what you think, isn’t it? You don’t fool me, you old bastard. You stand naked in front of me, I see you for what you are.”

He continued to stare ahead. “I made myself what I am today; I didn’t have anyone’s help. Not that I didn’t take favors when they were offered or exchanged for others. Only an idiot would have refused. But I’m my own man, Vera, always have been. That’s the one thing I’m most proud of. So when you … I’m not interested in anyone’s opinions of me—especially yours.”

“Why would you? You’re the center of the world.”

“That’s the spirit, honey!”

She chuckled. “Oh, Daddy, you’re so transparent, and d’you know why? Because you’re such a shitty parent. Having kids was never your thing. Your wanting Caro back has nothing whatsoever to do with her being your daughter.”

“Your attempts at psychoanalyzing me are laughable.”

She ignored his jibe. “It’s about you, Daddy. Everything’s all about you. Caro ran away from you and that’s what you can’t tolerate.”

“That’s nonsense and you know it.”

She shook her head, moving out from her corner to close with him again. “You keep trying to undercut me, but I’m the only one whose opinion matters to you.”

Carson stared out the window at the blur of the passing cityscape. “Eddy’s opinion mattered to me.”

“But your brother is dead, Daddy.” She slid farther toward him. “And that’s the crux of it. You never got over your brother. He was younger than you and yet he was elected president of the United States.”

“Not without my help!”

In the small silence, Vera said, “You see? It’s all laid out like the grid of a landing strip. If only you could see it.”

Carson’s voice was bleak. He seemed suddenly lost in time. “See what?”

“How much Edward meant to you, how much you loved him.” She stared at her father for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had softened considerably. “Did he love you back, Daddy?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Sure you know. You must know.”

“He accepted my help. He was grateful. He—”

“Fuck it, Daddy! Would you for once tell the truth?”

“It would be easier if he hadn’t thanked me.”

“But he did.”

“Oh, yes. Thanking people was always one of Eddy’s strong suits.”

“You say that like it’s a congenital defect.”

“It made him less sincere,” Carson said, “in my opinion.”

“Uh-huh, too nice for you, was he?” She nodded. “I can see how you’d view that as a defect.”

Carson’s lips moved without him saying a word out loud. Then he pinched the bridge of his patrician nose. “The trouble was, I never knew where I stood with Eddy.”

Vera threw back her head and laughed, causing him to whip around as he glared at her.

“What’s so damn funny?”

“Your brother made you insecure. God, I didn’t think anyone could do that to you.”

“You never knew Eddy.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Well…” Carson stared at his hands. “There was no way I could let you meet him. You understand that.”

“I understand that you had to keep your Main Line connections intact until you acquired enough power on your own.”

He shot her a sharp look. “That’s a pretty cynical way of looking at it.”

“Ours is a cynical world, Daddy.”

He nodded, almost, she thought, ruefully.

“Damn if it isn’t.”

THEY MET Annika in an open field near the airstrip. The wind was blowing, dragging her hair sideways across her face. Her hands were dug deep in the pockets of her trench coat, a stance like Humphrey Bogart’s in Casablanca.

Jack came halfway toward her, then abruptly stopped. Alli, at his side, broke away and ran pell-mell toward her. Just before she reached her, Annika took her hands out of her pockets. Jack automatically tensed. This was a weird moment. He was half expecting her to have a Sig Sauer in one hand.

Instead, Annika threw her arms wide and enfolded Alli, hugging her tight.

“I can’t believe it,” Alli said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Annika kissed the top of her head. “Honey, honey, honey,” she crooned.

Then she looked past Alli to where Jack stood. The most peculiar smile broke out across her face, part solemn, part impish, but altogether tentative.

All this time, Thatë, present under Jack’s sufferance, stayed back at the periphery of the field. It was difficult to know what he was looking at, impossible to know what he was thinking.

Alli, though reluctant, knew it was time to walk away. That left Jack and Annika. They were standing twenty feet from each other.

“I was too late with Arjeta and with Billy.” With one hand, she drew her hair off her face. “I found him before the cops did, but there was nothing I could do.”

“You could have called me.”

Her smile changed shape slightly. “And how far would that have gotten me?”

She was right, of course. At that point, he never would have listened to her. He came toward her, aware that his heart was beating painfully hard. He felt a roaring in his ears.

“I’ve seen Edon’s back.”

“Yes, well, where you were, I imagined that might happen. Thank you for saving her and all the rest of them.”

“Why are these three girls so important?”

“They know a secret.”

“Edon doesn’t.”

“No. But Arjeta told Liridona. I went to Washington to find Arjeta, to save her, but I was too late.”

“You want to know the secret.”

“I care about these girls. Deeply.”

“But the secret—”

“Jack, please recall what I told you. Secrets are our only weapon against the forces that seek to manipulate us.”

Jack believed her. No matter that he wanted to believe her, that, like Alli, he needed to believe her. He kept walking until he was just a handsbreadth away from her. He could smell her then, and his heart melted a little bit more.

“Before we go any further…”

“Yes, Jack?”

“I need to know about Senator Berns. I need the whole truth.”

“And nothing but the truth, so help me God?” Her tone was mocking.

He didn’t laugh. “You don’t believe in God.”

“Not after what’s happened to me.”

The sun was shining in her eyes, and he knew that he had dreamed about them. He’d only known that he’d woken in the morning drenched in sweat, sad beyond bearing. He’d put every emotion he possessed on hold, throwing himself into tending to Alli and to his job, which kept changing shape like a chimera. Now he understood his sorrow, and his paralysis. Somewhere inside him, he’d been waiting for this moment; somewhere inside him, he knew it would happen.

“Senator Berns wasn’t one of the good guys, Jack.”

“Meaning?”

“He was dealing with a very nasty element here in Eastern Europe.”

“Enemies of your grandfather.”

“Enemies of mine,” she said. “And now enemies of yours.”

Jack was shocked. “Arian Xhafa?”

“Berns was facilitating the arms deals with Xhafa. Cutting-edge stuff, just off the DARPA assembly line.” She cocked her head. “Evil comes in all flavors and guises, Jack. It’s a sad fact of life.” Her smile turned rueful. “You don’t believe me. Berns was chairman of the Senate Military Appropriations Committee, which includes DARPA. Check for yourself.”

Jack didn’t have to; he’d already discovered this fact for himself. And now he was angry. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this last year?”

“You weren’t ready to hear it.”

“Damnit, Annika, how could you know that?”

“I made a reasonable assumption. Was I wrong?”

“Stop, for pity’s sake, making decisions for me!”

Her extraordinary eyes watched him closely. “This is what you do with Alli, no?”

Yes, it certainly was, but he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of admitting it. “That’s different.”

“I disagree. You and Alli are both adults.”

“The analogy is spurious. I have far more experience.”

“And that means you know what’s best for her.”

“Yes.”

“At all times.”

He clamped his mouth shut.

“Jack, consider how you bridled when I told you you weren’t ready to hear the whole truth about Senator Berns.”

She was as maddening as ever. Somewhere inside him was a burst of laughter because this maddening trait was one of the things that caused him to fall in love with her with a passion that turned him inside out.

Taking a deep breath to center himself, he said, “What happened after you killed Berns? Xhafa’s still getting armaments—even faster and in more bulk.”

“It’s the devil-you-know theory. The person who stepped into the vacuum is worse than Berns. Far worse.”

“Who is it?”

In the last failing glimmers of sunlight, Annika’s carnelian eyes seemed so lucid it was possible to believe he could see clear through them into her soul. This was one of the unique assets with which God and her mother had blessed her.

“Tell me, Jack, have you ever heard of the Syrian?”

“ANNIKA DEMENTIEVA has entered Albania.”

The Syrian, listening to this news, found that his knuckles had gone white where they gripped his satellite phone. Involuntarily, he moved farther away from Arian Xhafa, who was embroiled with Caroline in another of their religio-political-postfeminist debates. The Syrian found them amusing, but Xhafa, true to his nature, took them as deadly serious.

“Where in Albania?” he said, when he’d gone outside.

“Vlorë.”

Then she must know, the Syrian said to himself. He heard the snuffling of the dogs as they scented him, saw the deep bowl of the sky, indigo at its apex. A gaudy sunset began to show itself. Tree frogs and crickets started up.

To the man on the other end of the line, he said, “Do you have a specific fix on her?”

“She’s been shadowed from the moment she flew in.”

The Syrian made an instant decision. “Then take care of the situation at once. I don’t want Xhafa getting wind that she’s nearby. Take her to the safehouse. You know which one.”

There was an instant’s hesitation. “She isn’t alone.”

The Syrian closed his eyes. “How many?”

“Three. A man, a girl, and a boy.”

Not so many, he thought. “I want her alive. Terminate the rest of them.”

“Your will, my hand.”

The Syrian put away the sat phone. He spent about fifteen seconds wondering what Annika was doing with a girl and a boy, but soon a landslide of business matters dismissed the thought from his mind, and it did not resurface until much later.

“I THINK we ought to move to a more secure location,” Annika said. She gestured. “I have a car waiting.”

“I promised Alli I’d let her talk to you about Liridona.”

Annika looked around. “In the car.”

“Why did you want to meet in such an open space?”

“Trust,” Annika said. “I wanted you to feel perfectly comfortable.”

He nodded, but said nothing. Gesturing to Alli and Thatë, he walked with Annika into the deep shadow of a thin line of trees within which an enormous car was waiting, its engine thrumming in a deep register.

“I should introduce the kid,” he said, as Alli and Thatë came up to them.

“No need.” Annika grinned at Thatë. “He works for me.”

Thatë and Alli got in the front seat with the driver, leaving Jack and Annika standing beside the open rear door.

“One of these days,” Jack said, “you’re going to give me a heart attack with your surprises.”

“God forbid!”

She placed a hand on his arm. It was a spontaneous gesture and yet it set off a fireworks display inside him. She must have somehow felt the ripple because she smiled.

“Oh, Jack, I never want to hurt you again.”

“But you will.”

“Not deliberately, this I swear to you.”

She leaned in and the kiss she gave him was as tentative as that first enigmatic smile. She drew back, but he caught her behind her neck, pulled her to him, and kissed her as he’d dreamed of kissing her in a reality he’d never thought could exist again.

He felt the world drop away from him. All that existed was the two of them, locked together, falling through space and time, back to when they had been together in the Ukraine last year, before the betrayal that was still a betrayal, but on another, slighter order of magnitude. A betrayal that could be forgiven without damages being assessed.

The pines above them shook and shivered, clouds passed by overhead, and the velvet evening seemed to wrap them in its cool embrace.

How quickly hate returns to love, he thought.

As they were about to get into the car, he said, “Annika, about you and Xhafa.”

“Later, my love. I’ll tell you everything.”

BALTASAR CLOSED his phone and went back to his surveillance of the Dementieva woman.

“Everything all right?” he said to Asu.

“They went into the line of pines.” Asu, the driver, put his field glasses down and pointed.

They were in an armored vehicle similar to the one that had brought Arian Xhafa and the Syrian from the air base to the compound. It was still light enough to see the stand of trees. The pines looked delicate in the gathering twilight, like a Japanese watercolor.

“What are our orders?” Yassin said from behind them.

“The woman is to be taken to the safehouse in the western district of Vlorë. The other three are to be killed.”

Baltasar could feel Yassin’s excitement coming off him in waves.

“Now,” he said. “As soon as we determine—”

At that moment, the huge car slid out from behind the trees and headed off to the east.

“Go,” Baltasar said. “Go!”

Asu started up the vehicle and put it into gear. The advantages of the vehicle were many, including its inch-and-a-half-thick armor plate and its two .30 caliber machine guns, mounted fore and aft, its maneuverability over any sort of terrain, and its storehouse of other weaponry, including tear-gas grenades, a handheld rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. On the other hand, it was noisy, relatively slow, and not as maneuverable as a car on normal surfaces. Even so, Baltasar favored it over the other forms of ground transport at the Syrian’s disposal.

The large car ahead had its head- and taillights on, but Baltasar instructed Asu to keep theirs off. They were phenomenally lucky that the 737 had landed at sunset. Now, in the twilight’s uncertain illumination, they could follow without fear of being detected.

The car bumped down country lanes into larger streets and then took the ramp onto the ring road that circumnavigated Vlorë. There was no telling where it was headed, and Baltasar was anxious not to lose sight of it.

Yassin leaned forward, body as tense as a drawn bow. “We should drive them off the road,” he said.

“Wait,” Baltasar said without turning around.

“And then, as they come out of the car, use the flamethrower to incinerate them one by one.”

Now Baltasar turned to him. “And what do you think the others will do while the first one is roasting, sit on their thumbs and wait to be set afire?”

Yassin grinned. “There’s always the thirty caliber. Poum, poum, poum!”

“All good things come to those who wait, Yassin.” He handed Yassin the specially reconfigured U.S. Army M24 SWS sniper rifle. “Check the magazine and get ready.”

FOR THE first forty-five minutes after the 737 took off from Vlorë, Dennis Paull reviewed what he himself knew about the multiple murders in D.C., beginning with the torture-killing of Billy Warren. He married that with the new information Jack had given him, including the damning evidence against Peter McKinsey from testimony from both Naomi and Chief Detective Heroe. The news that Naomi had been murdered by her partner had shaken him to the core. The very idea of such a thing was so alien he’d had to spend several minutes trying to get his mind around it. He’d been in the intelligence services long enough to have experienced or heard about various kinds of betrayals. All were heinous by their very nature, but this was in a category by itself. If there were, indeed, levels of hell, he hoped to God that McKinsey was inhabiting the lowest.

He took out a pad and pen and began jotting down notes. He also tried to make a perp tree, as they called it at Metro, of all the principals involved in the multiple-murder case. After some long and hard contemplation, plus some overseas calls, he had to admit that Jack’s instinct was right. Middle Bay Bancorp was the nexus point for everything. Henry Holt Carson’s bank, InterPublic, was in the process of buying Middle Bay—its books were even now being vetted by a team of forensic accountants led by John Pawnhill. If Jack was correct, Pawnhill was Mbreti, the American kingpin of Arian Xhafa’s sex trade empire. He thought a moment, then jotted down the name “Dardan Xhafa” with a question mark after it. If Pawnhill was the kingpin, what had Arian’s brother been? Or had he been there to keep an eye on Mbreti? Blood was thicker than water to these people, he knew.

But how did Middle Bay figure into the equation and what was Carson’s involvement? Alli’s discovery of the take-out menu from First Won Ton, the restaurant below which Xhafa’s slave market auctioned off its cherries, as they were called in slang, meant that her uncle was somehow involved in all this. But how? And, most baffling and frightening of all, why had President Crawford himself fast-tracked the buyout through the federal regulatory process?

Thinking of Alli put him in a depressed mood. He rose and went into the toilet to splash water on his face. He’d acted abysmally toward her all during the mission. He’d made himself believe that it was because her presence on a clandestine wet-work mission was highly inappropriate. He’d made himself believe that he was pissed that a tiny slip of a girl could best him in hand-to-hand combat. And those reasons might have been legit until he’d seen her in action. Both her courage and her prowess under extreme conditions were exemplary. He’d actually been proud of her, but he’d quickly tamped down on the feeling, preferring instead to keep needling her.

Now, staring at himself in the mirror, he was forced to admit his intense jealousy. The close relationship Jack had with her was what he’d always dreamed he’d have with his own daughter. Instead, he had driven her away and the fact that she’d returned, his grandson in tow, only underscored what he hadn’t had with her.

The truth was, Paull didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He had come to a point in his life when, inevitably, he had begun to look back and rue his mistakes, failings, and failures. It was a bitter time for him, made all the worse by his inability to readapt to field work. The only saving grace was that he’d yanked himself out of the field before Jack could suggest it.

Back in his seat, he lost himself in work and, an hour later, he had the skeleton of a plan he thought would work. He called Chief of Police Alan Fraine, and together they went over iterations of the plan until both of them were satisfied that, though far from perfect, it had the best chance of success. Both of them knew that they were up against powerful enemies bent on keeping the reasons for the murders secret. The murder of Naomi Wilde and subsequent arrest of Chief Heroe was proof of their enemies’ utter ruthlessness.

When at last all his work was, for the moment, done, Paull closed his eyes and slept for an hour. When he awoke, he was ravenously hungry. He rose and went directly to the galley to fix himself a sandwich. On the way, he took the time to confirm that the children were okay.

That was when he realized that Edon Kraja was missing.

EDON HAD chosen her moment carefully. She had slipped out of the 737 while Paull was deep in conversation with Jack, while Alli was talking with Thatë. With everyone engaged in their own private dramas, she had grabbed her opportunity to slither away, unnoticed.

Turning her back on the plane, she had jogged through the woods. She knew precisely where she was, knew intimately the cluster of small houses a half mile away. From the backyard of one of them she stole a bicycle, and, bending low over the handlebars, began her journey into Vlorë, to search for her sister Liridona.

Her first stop would be her parents’ house. She had no way of knowing whether Liridona was still at home or whether she had also been sold to feed their father’s insatiable gambling lust. Cycling as fast as she could, she prayed to Jesus and the Madonna that her sister was still free, that she’d be able to extricate her from home and take her far away from both their father and Arian Xhafa’s people.

The thought of what had happened to her happening to Liridona was a goad that drove her to pedal faster and faster. Xhafa was a brilliant organizer, she had learned. But he was also a ruthless killer and, even worse in her experience, a world-class sadist. For him, pain and suffering were the aphrodisiacs he needed to satisfy his sexual needs; without them, he was impotent.

From the moment he’d become aware of her, he’d taken an unhealthy interest in her. Weeding her out of the latest bowl of cherries, he had begun her “training,” as he called it. She called it torture. It wasn’t on the order of what the other cherries who’d come in with her suffered through—the gang rapes, the beatings, starvings, and then more gang rapes. He hadn’t wanted to strip her of her individuality, her humanity, as was being done in a coldly methodical way to the other cherries all around her. Culled out of the herd, she had been isolated. She had seen only him. He’d trained her to crawl on her knees to him, to lick his dirty feet clean, to grovel when she wanted food. Oddly enough, it was he who washed her every day, as tenderly as a parent bathes his infant, caressing her as he cleaned every gentle mound and shadowed dell of her body.

When she had completed the first stage of her training, he had begun to hurt her, first in small, subtle ways. Then the bruising began. He seemed to love looking at the bruises even more than causing them, as if she were a canvas and he, the artist, periodically standing back to admire—or, sometimes, adjust—his art. Pain as art, that defined the Arian Xhafa she knew. He had spent hours on end with her, as if she were to be his masterpiece.

And then he had marked her—branded her, more like it. He used a stiletto reserved for the occasion, whose tip he heated in the flame from a bronze brazier surmounted with strange bas-relief sculptures until it glowed cherry red. He had her lie flat on her stomach on the thin pallet he provided for her to sleep on. She wasn’t strapped down or bound in any way; he had trained her too well. Straddling her, he’d applied the glowing tip of the blade. One long wound a night for five nights. Five parallel lines, running red, to prove that she belonged to him.

Very few girls received this privilege, he’d told her. Less than a handful. She was among the elite of his empire, a concubine. She would never be sold; she was his forever.

“Count yourself lucky, Edon,” he had said the night it was over. “You’re one of the few. You’re my special little cherry.”