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I punched him, shattering his nose, sending the chair over backward. His head smacked into the concrete hard enough that he went abruptly, dangerously silent. For a second, I thought I'd hit him too hard in my anger, that I'd knocked him out, or worse.

Then he croaked out a laugh.

"Yeah, you wanted her little cunt. Something small enough to make you feel big."

I took a breath, trying to calm myself, then moved to him and righted the chair once more. Blood from his broken nose flowed in a black stream over his lips, reminding me of Vasylyna.

"It's one girl," I told him. "I'm not after your network, I'm not after your business. I'm after just one girl. Tell me where she is."

He spat again at me, this time ejecting blood. This time I was expecting it, and he missed.

"Fuck yourself."

"You're going to tell me."

"Fuck yourself. You might kill me, David. But I give up my contact, he will kill me. And if not him, the ones he works with, the ones who work with me." He shook his head, spat out more blood, this time directing it at the floor.

"This is the second time you've been in lockup in three, four weeks," I said. "You think the people up the line don't already think you've turned rat? You think the people who supply you, the people who work for you, don't already think you're compromised? You think they still believe they can trust you?"

"I'm getting out. They'll buy me out."

"You're going to tell me," I said.

"No, David. I'm not."

"Have it your way," I said, and went back to where the carryall waited on the floor. From inside I removed a hammer, a hacksaw, a pair of pliers, and a bottle of lighter fluid. I showed Arzu each item as I brought it out, then set them, in a line, on the ground so he could see them.

"You're going to fucking torture me?" There was bravado in his voice, so obvious that I knew he was scared. "You're going to fucking cut me? Beat me?"

"Oh, no," I said, opening the laptop. "These aren't for you, Arzu. They're for them."

I turned the computer, showed him the pictures I'd put up on the screen. The glow on the monitor illuminated his face, showed me the recognition and then the horror.

"You never should have told me you were married," I said.

"You cocksucker," he whispered.

"Your wife is very pretty. And the kids are good-looking, too. Your youngest, how old is he? I'm thinking he can't be much older than ten."

Arzu pulled his stare from the monitor to me, his expression warring between hate and fear.

"You fucker, you cocksucking motherfucker, you stay away from my family!"

"Well," I said. "That's really up to you now, isn't it, Arzu? You can tell me where I can find the girl, who you sold her to, or you can keep it to yourself. But you do that, you better pray to God that you can buy your way out of jail quick. Because if I don't get what I want by the time Celik comes back to collect you, you better believe the first stop I make after leaving here is your home."

I snapped the lid of the laptop down, letting the gesture serve as emphasis, then set it aside and met his eyes. He stared back at me, brimming with hate, believing every one of my words.

That I would never-could never-bring myself to follow through on my threat didn't matter. Arzu could imagine the horrors I threatened to visit upon his family, because Arzu could imagine himself doing the exact same things. What was beyond the pale to me was simply the way you did business to him. He believed me, because he still thought that we were alike.

"Theunis Mesick," Arzu muttered.

"Where do I find him?"

"Amsterdam." Arzu shook his head, angry. "I don't know where."

"You have a way to contact him," I said. It wasn't a question. "Tell me the procedure."

"You motherfucker."

"I can head over to your home right now. That what you want?"

"Fuck you! I have a number, all right? A phone number, it's for a landline somewhere, I don't know where. I leave a message for him, tell him I have a friend who'll be coming to town, give him a number. He calls me back, we set it up!"

I pulled out the BlackBerry again. "Give it to me. Now."

"I can't remember!"

"Try harder, Arzu Bey."

He closed his eyes, struggling to recall the number, then slowly recited a string of digits. I punched them in, dialed, then put the phone to my ear, waiting for it to connect. It rang twice, and then a man's voice answered me in Dutch.

"Hallo?"

"I'm looking for Theunis," I said, in English. "Theunis Mesick."

"He is not here now," the man said. "You leave a message, a number, I will tell to call you back."

"I'll try again later."

I hung up, began replacing all of my things in the carry-all, all the tools, the laptop. I removed the remaining envelope of money, put the handcuff key inside it, then dropped it on the ground. All the while, Arzu was shouting at me.

"You got what you want? You fucking have what you want, you happy, you fucker? You motherfucker! You fucking stay away from my family! You stay away, you stay away from my boys, I will kill you! I will kill you myself, I will fuck your corpse you touch them, you go near them again!"

I zipped the carry-all closed, hoisted it onto my shoulder, and turned to face him. He was breathless, going hoarse in his outrage.

"You fucking stay away from my fucking family!"

There was nothing that I knew about the man in front of me that I liked. Nothing about him that I could think of worth preserving. He kept, bought, and sold slaves. He had sent men to my home to murder me, and in so doing, had nearly cost me Miata, Alena, and a child I hadn't known existed.

What I needed to do now, I knew, was kill him.

"Arzu," I told him, "if I have it my way, you'll never see me again."

I left him there to shout in the darkness, screaming threats and promises that I hoped he'd never be able to keep.

CHAPTER

Twenty-five The number Arzu had given me was for a fuck factory off Marnixstraat. It took two phone calls and almost exactly twenty-four hours to arrange a meeting with Theunis Mesick there. I was in a hurry to make up for the time I'd lost in Trabzon, and went directly from the airport in Amsterdam to meet him.

Mesick was another of the thug brigade, big the way Vladek Karataev had been big, but blond and younger, maybe in his early to mid-twenties. He wore leather pants and a muscle shirt that showed off full-sleeve tattoos on both arms, elaborate skin art that had been thrown together without rhyme or reason, with naked women and death's-head skulls and bleeding roses. I dropped Arzu's name along with two hundred euros, saying that I'd been told he could help me find "the right girl." The combination was enough to buy a trip across town in his company, to a houseboat moored just off the Nieuwe Herengracht canal.

Things were going well, or at least I thought they were, right up to the moment we stepped into the living room of the boat. Then Theunis Mesick turned on me with a knife in his hand.

I was jet-lagged and feeling ragged already, and I paid for it in reaction time. His first cut caught me high on my right forearm, going deep as I tried to get out of the way. The arm went numb with shock for a second as I backpedaled. I was still carrying the small duffel full of my belongings on my shoulder, and I swung it around with my left to block the next stab, and it worked, but he batted the bag away and then I had nothing left.

Knives suck, and fighting someone who has one sucks even worse, because there's no way to survive without getting cut, and I already had one to show for it. For some reason, people think of knives as somehow less dangerous, less lethal than firearms, and it's a bullshit and very dangerous assumption, because, like guns, knives are lethal weapons. Knife fights are something that happen between the Sharks and the Jets, that's it.