"Done?" I asked.
"Done," Alena told me.
"Good," I said, and fell asleep then and there, in my blood-and saline-soaked bed.
CHAPTER
Twenty-eight The day after they closed the wound in my side, Bridgett drove me back to Dublin, this time to drop me off at the airport, rather than to pick me up. I was clean-shaven, wearing my new suit and a clean shirt, with a new pair of glasses that Bridgett had gotten made for me at a one-hour place while I'd been sleeping most of the previous day away. The stitches in my side itched, the skin tight, and again I was suffering cotton-mouth, but now it was due to the antibiotics I was taking, and not from the fact that I was in compensated shock. While I'd been unconscious, Alena and Bridgett had also sewn up the cut in my forearm. My palm they'd left to a bandage and more superglue.
"You have any reason to believe this place you're going to in Nevada will get you what you want?"
"None at all," I said. "But I think the information is accurate."
"Why's that?"
"Because the guy who gave it to me believed I would kill him if it wasn't."
"Did you?" She didn't take her eyes off the road.
"No," I said.
Bridgett slowed to pay the toll over the River Liffey. Dublin spread out to the east, hidden in the rain. As she accelerated again, she said, "Guy sells people into slavery."
"Yes, he does."
"Explain this to me."
"Explain what?"
"That fucker didn't deserve to live. But you let him go."
"You think I should have punched his ticket?"
"If anyone was going to do it…"
"I thought about it," I admitted. "This other guy, too, Arzu Kaya. Pure piece of human excrement, that one. I thought about killing them both."
"But you didn't."
I shook my head.
"Why didn't you?"
"It's not about them," I said. "It's about me." I'd booked my flight as Matthew Twigg, flying Continental to Seattle via Newark. Maybe it was because I'd been doing so damn much travel, maybe it was because I'd be flying into the U.S. again, but I took extra precautions this time to reinforce my cover. I abandoned the duffel that had seen me through the last four weeks of globe-trotting, exchanging it for a nice leather two-piece set, one rolling bag, the other a messenger. The rolling bag I loaded with clothes and appropriate toiletries. The messenger carried my laptop and its attendant cables, as well as copies of The Financial Times and The Economist. I still had Bakhar's little black book and Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry, as well. The little black book I kept in the messenger bag. The BlackBerry I put in a case on my hip, even going so far as to buy a Bluetooth headset for it.
Just your run-of-the-mill globe-trotting financial wizard, that was me.
The problem wasn't with the paper, per se, but with the itineraries. One-way tickets raise eyebrows amongst those who look for such things. While the passport that Nicholas Sargenti had supplied for Matthew Twigg had plenty of international travel attributed to it already, nowhere was there an entry stamp for Ireland. In and of itself, that wasn't extraordinary; most of the EU didn't bother for travel between member nations. But it was another anomaly, along with the one-way itinerary, and it made me nervous.
And sure enough, I was popped coming through customs in Newark.
"How long have you been away, Mr. Twigg?"
"Ten days," I said. "Had a deal to close in Dublin, then took a day to visit the Rock of Cashel."
He nodded slightly, flipping slowly through my passport beneath the purple glow of the blacklight by his terminal. There were plenty of ways he could determine that I was lying, but none of them were quick. Despite whatever efforts governments made to convince people of the contrary, his terminal didn't have a global database of travelers and their itineraries.
"They didn't stamp your entry," the agent said. "Next time you want to make sure they do, all right?"
"They didn't?"
"Nah, I'm not seeing it."
He marked my passport, whacked it with his stamp, and handed it back.
"Welcome home," he told me. I followed the connecting flight all the way through to SeaTac. It was after ten when I arrived, and I found myself a room at a budget hotel near the airport, booked myself on the earliest flight I could find the next morning to Las Vegas. I took a shower, careful to keep the stitches on my arm and side dry, which actually took some doing, and when I was finished, I felt like I still had a film of soap and sweat clinging to my body. I set the alarm on the BlackBerry to wake me with plenty of time for the flight, then killed the lights and lay on my back on the bed, with the television on low for company.
Theunis Mesick hadn't been able to give me much. He had been, he explained, the middleman. Arzu had handled the money, arranged the sales, as he had arranged the sale of Tiasa. Mesick's job had been to transport her from Trabzon and to take her, via Amsterdam, to the U.S. For doing this, Arzu had paid him almost twenty thousand euros. Mesick had been smart enough not to mention anything else he might have done with Tiasa, which had probably saved his life; if he'd confirmed what I suspected, that he, like all the men before him, had raped her, I'd likely have killed him then and there, and to hell with the rumblings of my conscience.
Mesick had simply been another link in the supply chain, and his information supported that. The only names he knew were Arzu's and Karataev's. He'd been given a phone number to use once he'd reached Las Vegas with Tiasa and told to call it using a prepaid cell phone. When he did, instead of a person, he always reached an answering machine. He would leave a message with the number of his phone, and within an hour of doing so would receive a text message telling him when and where to make the delivery.
It was a clean system, very difficult to trace back, and one that left nothing incriminating in its wake.
Mesick had been sincerely unable to remember the number, despite my threats, but it didn't really matter. The number he was told to call had never been the same one twice. Even had he been able to recall it, I was certain that all it would get me would be an out-of-service message. If the people on this end of the supply line weren't all using prepaid cell phones as well, they were fools. And I knew already that they weren't.
What Mesick had given me instead were directions to the drop site, where he'd brought Tiasa. Why he could recall that and not a phone number I didn't know, and it made me suspicious.
That Arzu had set me up by sending me to Mesick wasn't lost on me. Nor was the fact that I'd left both men alive. But Mesick was convinced Arzu was dead. Unless Arzu managed to buy himself out of lockup, there was no reason for Mesick to believe otherwise. And if I believed Mesick's information-and I didn't see much choice-then Mesick had no way of warning whoever had Tiasa that I was coming.
It wasn't ideal at all, but it was as close to a level playing field as I was likely to get. It was 101 degrees when I arrived in Las Vegas at eight in the morning. By the time I'd rented a car and checked into a hotel room well away from the Strip, it was ten, the mercury was kissing 108 and still climbing.
My rental had a Magellan GPS unit, and I used it, in conjunction with a newly purchased map, to plot myself a course out of town, heading northeast on Interstate 15. Vegas thinned, then dwindled, giving way to new developments peppering both sides of the highway, some of them left only partially constructed. The housing crash had clearly taken a boot to the nuts of Las Vegas.
Mesick hadn't had an address as much as a location, and with only his directions to go by, the doubt came gleefully creeping back as the Mojave Desert stretched itself out on all sides. After half an hour I passed the turnoff to the Valley of Fire Highway, and that was in keeping with what he'd told me. I stuck to the interstate as he had done, wondering what Tiasa had seen of the landscape, what she had made of this alien world. Wondering if she had been afraid still, or again, or if she'd felt nothing, turned numb by it all.