“Is this the place?” he said, leaning toward the man behind the wheel.
A dark-skinned ethnic Gheg with a black scruff of beard on his cheeks and a knitted white skullcap of the sort favored by his nation’s Moslem majority, the driver shook his head — an affirmative gesture in Albania — his look in the rearview mirror intended to make Sergei feel foolish for having asked an unnecessary question. He possessed the unmistakable scorn of the zealot toward one whose motives were seen to be venal and selfish, although that hadn’t seemed an obstacle to the procurement of the deadly technology Sergei had offered up for sale. There were, he thought, endless degrees of hypocrisy bridging the gap between world and want.
Sergei studied the heavy brush on the slope as the driver came to a full stop alongside it, pulling close enough for the tangled outgrowth of leaves and stems to rake across the Citroen’s flank. The wait that followed prompted another attack of nerves. Sergei knew the car’s approach would have been observed, and his inability to detect any sign of his hidden watchers made him feel uneasy and vulnerable. Still, he fought to take hold of himself. The Albanian guerrillas had every reason to be cautious. Furthermore, his two comrades were adequate insurance against deceit, and imposing reminders of his own linkage to the organizatsiya, a force whose enmity it would be madness to provoke.
He had waited for nearly five minutes when his eye caught a slight shuffle of movement in the brush above him. Then, at last, the guerrillas came threading down the slope, scurrying from the foliage one and two at a time and descending onto the pass just yards in front of the car.
There were a half dozen of them altogether, coarse, rugged men that shared many of the driver’s dark tribal features. They had assault rifles slung over their shoulders — Kalashnikovs, Berettas, MP5’s. Their clothing was grimy from long wear, and ranged from combat fatigues to the name-brand American denims, athletic jackets, and sneakers that had become status symbols in the Asian and Eastern European nations where they were often cheaply manufactured before being shipped to the States, given an inflated value, then exported to the very countries in which they had been made to be sold at an astronomical profit. It was another of the delicious ironies that had occurred to Sergei today, bringing to mind an image of the legendary serpent devouring its own tail.
But he had no time now to mull these things. The apparent leader of the group, a taut, sharp-nosed man in fatigues with a long diagonal scar on his right cheek, was moving up closer to the car, two of his clansmen several paces behind him. He held in his right hand a worn leather satchel, and would be no less eager than Sergei to complete their business.
When he reached the Citroen’s front grille, Sergei lifted his own case off the floor and turned to the stocky guard beside him.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Molkov nodded. A short-barreled Micro-Uzi hung outside his shirt. Weighing under five pounds and just ten inches long with its tubular metal stock folded, the compact submachine gun was scarcely larger than a pistol. In front, Alexandre displayed an identical SMG, as well as a shoulder-holstered Glock 9mm, with equal impunity. They had driven out of Tirana with the weapons stashed beneath their seats, but now were too far from any policed area to worry about having to conceal them. The control of the outlaw bands that occupied these mountains was based on ancient clan ties and validated by strength of arms. Brandishing the guns in open view was as much a matter of earning their respect as it was of physical protection.
Leaving the Albanian behind the wheel, the three of them got out of the car and walked around its front grille. As they did, Sergei’s companions fell in on either side of him, Molkov to his right, Alexandre to his left. The guerrillas stood very still on the road and eyed them warily. There was no sound except for a brief ripple of birdsong that seemed to be sucked into the vast and hollow silence of the chasm below like a brightly colored ribbon caught in a vacuum.
Sergei approached the man with the scar on his face, a cord of tension once again twisting in his stomach. On the surface, the transaction he was about to conclude seemed almost routine — an exchange of money for black-market goods on some remote alpine pass in a country that was known for its illicit trading, and that amounted to nothing more than a parenthesis on the European continent. He did not know exactly where he was, would not be able to find this forsaken place on the map once he left it behind.
But it was here, in what were appropriately called the Mountains of the Damned, that he was about to commit treason on a scale previously unheard of, perhaps even expand the very definition of the word to new conceptual bounds. Indeed, if he were to contemplate it, he imagined he might feel like a swimmer who had gone out farther from shore than ever before, each stroke fueled by a little inner dare, his confidence sustained with occasional backward glances to reassure himself he was still within sight of land, until at one point he turned and saw nothing but ocean ahead, ocean behind him, ocean stretching off infinitely in every direction, and suddenly realized that some trick of the tide had swept him off in an eyeblink, carrying him beyond the point of no return.
But enough, he admonished himself. Enough of that. He had made his choices and there was a deal to be done.
He and the guerrilla leader looked each other over with obligatory nods of acknowledgment. Then Sergei set his suitcase down on the hood of the car, thumbed open its combination latches, and raised the lid.
The guerrilla leader glanced down into the case.
“Yes,” he said in Russian, something like wonder on his features. “Yes, yes.”
“It’s all inside,” Sergei said. “The component, of course, as well as detailed instructions and schematics for its placement within the larger device. And a little something extra that you may tell the purchaser is both a test and a taste.” Ah, yes, a taste. Like caviar. Or a vintage cigar. “Everything that will be needed in Kazakhstan.”
“You are certain the information is reliable?”
“Absolutely. I’ve provided it in duplicate, both on disk and paper.” Sergei gave the guerrilla another moment to study the contents of the briefcase, then closed its lid. “Now the payment.”
A thin smile touching his lips, the guerrilla nodded, then presented his satchel to Sergei.
Sergei felt a spark of excitement at the weight of its contents. Suddenly his fingers were trembling. Holding it by the strap with one hand, he lifted its flap with the other and looked inside.
It took him a moment to react, and when he did it was with shock and icy disbelief. He paled, all the blood in his body seeming to flush to his feet.
The satchel was filled with thick packs of blank white paper cut to the approximate size of American banknotes and bound together with rubber bands.
He snapped his eyes up at the guerrilla leader, saw that his smile had tightened at its corners, then turned quickly to Molkov.
“These bastards have dared to cheat us,” he said.
Molkov was staring at him without expression.
“Did you hear me?” Sergei’s voice was furious as he upended the satchel, letting the rectangular bundles of paper spill to the ground. “There’s no money!”
Molkov kept staring at him.
Gaping with bewilderment, Sergei spun toward Alexandre.
The Glock was in his hand, raised level with Sergei’s chest. Its silenced barrel spat twice, and Sergei reeled backward and dropped to the road, killed instantly, his jacket stained red where both shots had penetrated his heart. A look of confusion and betrayal was frozen on his face.
Molkov glanced down at the corpse a moment, nodded approvingly, then turned to the guerrilla leader.