Walking dead

PASSWORD INCORRECT. TWO ATTEMPTS REMAINING.

Then the screen went dark again.

That was unusual enough to give me pause, to make me realize that I had, finally, hit a true dead end. The warning and the ten-minute wait said it all; however the computer was protected, it was serious encryption. I wasn't going to get through with blind luck or by trying to reboot the machine.

I looked at the phone again, putting what was before me together with what I'd learned from Mesick. Whoever Arzu and he had dealt with on this end had outdone themselves in the anonymity department. Someone would call into the phone, and the computer would answer, then forward whatever message was left via either text or email. Whoever received the message could then respond with a text or email of their own, sent back to the computer, where it would in turn be routed to the initial caller.

It was elegant and insulated and there was no way that I could see to crack it. All the phones concerned were certainly prepaid cellular, which meant I had no means to trace ownership, especially if whoever had set up the coms system was in the habit of changing the ones they used regularly, which was a given. Getting into the computer would take an expert and time, and while I could think of a few places to find experts in Las Vegas, while I might even be able to spare the time, in the end, I wasn't certain it would be worth the effort. The best I would get would be, perhaps, an archive of messages sent and received, none of which would be incriminating in and of itself. Any phone numbers I found would be useless.

The other option I could think of, at the moment, was to look at the land, dig around in county records, find out who owned the buildings, who was paying the power bills. But like trying to chase down the numbers, I could see how that would end, too. Someone careful enough to have gone to these lengths for their coms wasn't going to drop the ball when it came to leaving a paper trail. Even if I managed to trace ownership back through one or two or however many shells and blinds, the odds were I'd end with a farmer who received a cashier's check promptly on the fifteenth of each month for the use of his land, and it was unlikely even then that he'd know who actually was sending him the money.

It felt like Dubai again, and not only because of the heat. For a good five minutes, I stood in that stifling little room, wondering what to do next. I could only think of one thing.

With the bolt cutters, I smashed the computer to pieces. Then I went after the phone. I told myself that I was doing it to put a dent in their finely tuned operation, that, if nothing else, it would slow them down a little while, at least until they found a new place, a new computer, a new phone. They would have to rebuild, set up new protocols. It would take time before they got their system up and running again.

Just not very much time.

For most of the drive back to Vegas, I didn't think much of anything. I felt tired, not just in need of sleep, but truly weary. The stitches in my side and forearm hurt, and the skin along my left palm had begun to itch in earnest, now that my hand was starting to heal. When I'd been swinging the bolt cutters, I'd maybe been swinging harder than I should have done.

I stopped for a meal at a diner on the way back to my hotel because I felt I should, rather than because I had any appetite for it. There were multiple racks of free newspapers, nothing more than collections of ads, just inside the entrance, almost all of them telling me that women with names like Juliette and Morgana and Devyne would be happy to take my money to make me happy. A couple of the ads actually used words like "fresh" and "young" and even "barely legal."

It made me think of Kekela, and then I was thinking of Tiasa yet again. When my meal came, I found I couldn't even bring myself to take a bite of it. I paid, left, picked up more water at a convenience store, and finally returned to my room.

I didn't know what to do next.

There were options, of course. Kekela had spoken of the "mongers" when we'd visited Rattlesnake, the men who frequented whores, who made it a game. There were mongers everywhere, certainly here in Las Vegas. With a couple of days, I could probably locate a few. With a couple of weeks, I could maybe earn their trust enough to find the specialists, the ones who knew where to find girls so young that, even in a state with legalized prostitution, they remained hidden.

Or I could head back to Amsterdam. I could chase down Mesick, see if there was something I'd missed, something he had held back. I could go further, to Trabzon, and renew my acquaintance with Captain Celik, and hope to grab more time alone with Arzu Kaya. I could rewind the clock all the way to Georgia, and hope that Mgelika Iashvili knew more than he'd said, had one last crumb for me to follow.

Or you could let it all go, I told myself. You could just walk away.

But even thinking that, I knew that I couldn't.

One month of chasing after Tiasa Lagidze had led me here. Four weeks that had shattered the life Alena and I had built for ourselves, and in so doing, had also destroyed the walls I had put between the man I had been and the man I had become. Iashvili had said we were the walking dead, Alena and I, and he'd been right, but not in the way he imagined. Like Bakhar Lagidze, I hadn't left my past behind; I'd tried to bury it, alive and kicking, and it had come back on me the same as it had come back on him. Ten men dead by my hand in Batumi and Dubai was the proof.

Everything had brought me here, the same way it had brought Tiasa.

Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick.

And one other person, at the end of the line. One person, and I didn't have the first idea where to look.

Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick…

It hadn't just been any supply chain, I realized. It had been their supply chain. I'd thought that the connection had been between Bakhar and Karataev, that there had been nothing to tie Bakhar to Arzu. Yet there was Arzu connecting to Mesick, and Mesick saying he had brought girls to the U.S., to Nevada, before.

I opened the laptop, brought up Vladek Karataev's files from his BlackBerry, began going through the entries in his address book one at a time. There was nothing that looked like a phone number for somewhere in the States, certainly nothing that looked like one for Nevada. I combed through them a second time, and got the same result.

But there had to be a connection.

Bakhar's little black book was in the messenger bag, where I'd left it, and I dug it out, started going through it again. Same thing, nothing with a U.S. area code, nothing that looked like a number for Nevada. I went back to the listings from the BlackBerry, began comparing each entry, one at a time, alphabetically.

Under the, Bakhar had an entry, "Pretty." The number, at first glance, was for Ukraine, with a 380 country code prefix. The number ended in 207. When I checked Karataev's, I found an entry under the word krasivyj, which also meant "pretty." The numbers weren't identical; Karataev's first four digits were different. But like in Bakhar's book, the number ended in 207.

Reversed, the number began 702.

702 was one of the two area codes in use for the state of Nevada. I knew that, because it was on the goddamn telephone on the desk right before my eyes.

I had two possible phone numbers for "pretty" in Nevada. Whoever the hell that was. If they were still in service. If they were real numbers. If they weren't actually for somebody or some establishment in Ukraine.

Using the BlackBerry seemed like bad luck, like tempting fate, never mind how many times I had changed SIMs on the thing. I used the telephone on the desk instead, hit 9 for an outside line, and dialed the number from Karataev's listing, thinking that one would be the most current.

It rang. Four times.

Then a woman said, "This is Bella."

"Bella," I said. "I understand you're the person to talk to if I'm looking for some company."