"How many?" I asked, then repeated it in Russian. "How many men here? How many keeping you here?"
The pregnant girl raised her eyes. They were big and brown and maybe just a little bit hopeful. She held up her right hand, five fingers splayed.
One left, I thought.
"You're going to hear more shooting." I kept my voice soft, sticking with Russian. "Stay still. I'll come back when it's over."
I shut the door silently, checked the hall again. Above me, a floorboard creaked. The close air and the heat had me perspiring heavily, and I could feel sweat running down my neck, making my glasses slip on my nose. The stairs loomed at the end of the hall, narrow and dangerous and offering me no other choice. Stairs were a trap, one of the few tactical situations where nothing was on your side. They offered no mobility, no scope, no eyelines. The last man was on the floor above me, and he knew, like I knew, that the only way to reach him was the stairs, straight up the mother of all fatal funnels and into a blind turn.
I backed down the hall the direction I had come, watching the stairs until the corner. I turned, stepped over the bodies blocking the door to the front room, entered low. The man in the dishdasha was where I'd left him. I sidestepped over to the sheesha, lifted it in one hand and dumped the contents of the water pipe on him. He spluttered, gagging.
I put the Beretta to his neck and forced him to his feet. He nearly fell when he tried to put weight on his broken knee, his face creasing with pain.
"Stay silent, you might live through this," I told him.
He bit down on his suffering, nostrils flaring as he fought to control his breathing, jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscles working. As much fear as the girls carried, he doubled it in hatred, and every ounce of that hatred was directed at me.
"We're going upstairs," I whispered to him. "You first."
Carefully, keeping the Beretta on him, we moved back into the inner hall. At the corner, I pulled him around, put him in front of me. He needed a hand on the wall to steady himself.
"Go," I told him. "Keep it slow. Not a word, not a sound."
He looked back at me with my gun, decided that was enough persuasion to do as I said, and began hobbling slowly toward the stairs. I followed a few feet before stopping, keeping distance, letting him lead me.
The stairs were hard for him, and his progress slowed even further. One step at a time, careful, painful, measured. It wasn't that different from how I'd have climbed the stairs, knowing what was waiting for me at the top.
Whoever was up there thought so, too.
The shots came at an angle, blowing through the drywall on the right-hand side, angled down, a long chatter from another assault rifle. Only a few hit the man in the dishdasha, and he slammed against the left wall, then tumbled back down the stairs in a heap, head over heels until he was sprawled on the floor, broken and dead.
I brought up the Beretta and waited. I didn't have to wait more than a minute, but it felt longer. Sweat slipped down my back and into my eyes, making them sting. Then I heard the floorboards creaking again, the rustle of movement, and I saw the feet on the stairs, black sneakers. Then the legs, the barrel of an AK, and that was enough for me. I put one from the Beretta into the left sneaker, heard the scream, watched the last man fall face-first down the stairs, onto the body of the man in the dishdasha. He'd managed to keep hold of the AK when he fell.
I shot him twice more, and made sure he'd never be able to use it again.
CHAPTER
Sixteen There were eight girls in all. The eldest of them was around seventeen. The youngest, I think, was eleven. I don't know. I didn't have the heart to ask.
Tiasa wasn't among them.
I went room to room, telling them to get dressed as quickly as they could, trying to get them mobilized. Aside from the pregnant girl, there was another who understood my Russian, and a third girl who could manage in pidgin English. I asked if any of them knew how to drive, and the pregnant girl did.
"Where are you from?" I asked her.
"Volgograd."
I gave her the keys to the Toyota SUV that I'd found on the man in the dishdasha.
"Go to the Al Maidan Tower on Al-Maktoum Road," I told her. "It's easy to find, just follow the signs. Go straight there, straight to the Russian Federation Consulate, it's on the third floor. Take all of the girls with you. Tell them where you were, what they did to you. Leave me out of it."
"I understand."
Together, we hustled the girls out of the building, to the Toyota. The camp had begun to stir, and a couple of the men there watched us pass without expression or comment or apparent interest. The girls shuffled, some of them crying. Mostly, they seemed numb, very much in shock.
Before they were all loaded, I stopped one of the girls, the other one who'd understood my Russian. I'd seen her before, on Vladek's BlackBerry, the picture of her smiling as she believed his lies. It hadn't been more than ten days since he'd shipped her to Turkey, but all the same, I had to check the smartphone to be sure.
"Wait," I told her.
She looked at me with alarm, the fear that had begun dissipating instantly in evidence again.
I brought up Tiasa's picture on the BlackBerry. She cringed at the sight of the smartphone in my hand, perhaps recognizing it as Vladek's, perhaps simply because of the association it held. She started to bring a hand to her face, to hide it from the camera, before she realized that I was trying to show her something on the screen.
"This girl," I said. "Do you know her? Have you seen her?"
She shook her head, anxious.
"The man in Georgia," I said. "The man who sold you, he sold her, too. That man can't hurt you. He'll never hurt you again. It's all right, you can tell me the truth."
She bit her lip, then nodded.
"You remember her?"
"I remember her. Tiasa. She was… she cried all the time."
"I was told she was here, that she came with you and some others to Dubai. Do you know where she is? Do you know where I can find her?"
The girl shook her head.
"You don't know?"
The girl looked to the SUV, where the others were waiting for her to join them. The engine started up. She looked back to me, afraid of telling me something I didn't want to hear.
"She didn't come to Dubai," the girl said.
"You're sure?"
"She didn't come to Dubai."
"Do you know where she went? Do you know what happened to her?"
"Please, mister…"
"Do you know where they took her?"
"No!" The girl was nearing tears. "No, I don't know, I swear. Please, please can I go? Please can I go now?"
I saw then that she was shivering despite the heat.
I helped her into the SUV. I closed the door. The vehicle pulled out almost immediately.
I looked at the picture of Tiasa Lagidze on the BlackBerry for a few seconds. Then I switched to check for messages. Like my search for Tiasa, the result was identical.
I had nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER
Seventeen They'd burned my home to the ground.
I sat behind the wheel of the Skoda Danil Joshi had rented all of fifty minutes earlier at the airport in Batumi, listening to the engine idle and the rain beat against the roof, to the whine of the wiper blades swiping at the beads of water trickling down the windshield. It was after midnight, and the only illumination came from the headlights on the car, and while the picture was incomplete, it was enough, and I could feel my pulse beating in my temples.
The fire had burned hot. Blackened concrete broke through the rubble of charred wood and glass, the fractured pieces of the house's foundation. If anyone had come to fight the blaze, they'd come too late. It had been left to burn itself out. The only structure still resembling a structure at all was our little studio. Two of its walls and the roof had gone entirely. One mirror, cracked and charred, still hung within, reflecting light back at me.