Some fifty miles out of Vegas, I turned off the highway, making south. Cropped buttes rose to the east and west as I continued away from the interstate. I began to see the first cautious indications of community again, faded road signs pointing me to places called Amber and Glassand. I even saw some green in the distance, where Lake Mead terminated into the Moapa Valley south of me, wresting fertile soil from the desert. Seeing the green would've given Tiasa hope, I thought.
But Mesick hadn't taken her that far.
A dirt road cut off the blacktop, heading east, and I followed it perhaps two hundred yards, the car leaving a cloud of dust in my wake. The road ended as insolently as it had begun, stopping without warning at two cinderblock buildings, each of them easily a sixth the size of the cottage I'd left in Ballygar. I stopped the car, letting the engine run, waiting to see if anyone would emerge from the structures. No one did. Neither of the buildings had windows that I could see. On the one furthest away, perhaps twenty meters, I saw a small satellite dish on the roof, and a compressor for an air conditioner.
I killed the engine and got out. It was furiously hot, as bad as Dubai, but devoid of even the barest humidity, the sunlight bright enough to hurt the eyes. I waited, listening, but there was no sound, nothing. Not wind, not traffic, nothing. I might as well have been standing in a vacuum.
The nearer of the two buildings, the one without the satellite dish, was unlocked. I pushed the door open, then stood in the doorway, waiting for my eyes to adjust. The stench of baked urine and shit washed out at me. I stepped inside, looking around, and quickly learned that there was almost nothing here to see. An empty plastic jerry can lay on its side by the door, and beside it a dented and weathered galvanized bucket. There were no fixtures, no sockets, and I doubted the building ever used power, let alone had been wired for it. I picked up the jerry can, stepped outside with it, trying to get fresh air, then uncapped it and gave it a sniff. There was no scent at all.
I looked back into the building, stomach churning, and no longer from the smell. It wasn't a building; it was a cell. That was probably how it was done. Mesick or someone like him would bring a girl to the location, lock her into the building, then retreat. There were literally hundreds of places in the surrounding terrain where someone could set up overwatch and never be seen. Lying in cover with a pair of binoculars and a bottle of Gatorade, the watcher would confirm the delivery, wait for however long they deemed prudent upon the trafficker's departure, and then move in for the pickup.
Meanwhile, a terrified girl would be trapped in a cinderblock hotbox. Here's a jerry can of water and a bucket to crap in, little girl, someone'll be back for you later.
I threw the jerry can back inside, headed for the second building. The door was metal, same as the first had been, but this time was chained shut, the links held fast with a padlock. I pounded hard on it with my right fist, but there was no response. I thought maybe I was hearing a fan running. When I pulled on the padlock, it didn't give.
I hadn't thought it would. Eight miles south was Glassand. I found a mom-and-pop hardware store and bought myself some bolt cutters, then went around the corner and found a mom-and-pop grocery, where I picked up two liter bottles of water. I finished one bottle driving back the way I'd come, returning to find that nothing had been disturbed. Even the dust had settled once more.
The bolt cutters went through the padlock exactly the way they were designed to. I yanked the chain free and kicked the door open, nervous about what I might find. But there was no stench, no body, nothing like that. Just stale air being pushed around by the whirring air conditioner, and a folding table pressed against the far wall. On the table was a laptop computer, hooked to a power outlet. Another cable ran up the wall, presumably to the sat dish on the roof. Connected to the computer was a cheap cell phone, also on power from the outlet.
I gave the room another looking over before moving inside, thinking that people this careful might well be the kinds of people who set booby traps. Nothing gave me cause for alarm-at least, not more than I'd seen already. I approached the computer, not touching it. A green light glowed at its front, and when I leaned my head down toward it, I could just make out the sound of its internal fans going, struggling to keep the machine cool. The monitor was dark. I looked at the phone next, again not touching anything, and it was on, and while the signal strength I was reading on its screen wasn't terribly strong, it was enough that I knew the phone had reception.
I clicked the button beneath the trackpad on the laptop. The screen flickered to life, an ocean-green background and a password prompt. I considered, then typed in the words "you sons of bitches," running them all together without spaces. I knew it wasn't going to work, and wasn't surprised when the computer told me as much.
What surprised me was the message that followed.
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.