The Eighth Day (27 page)

Danny nodded.

“Then I’m sure you’ll understand: the last thing Remy wants or needs is a visit from a stranger.” He paused to let the words sink in, then turned to the young security guard and gave an order. “Yusuf will take you back to your hotel,” he said. “When I see Remy, I’ll mention your visit. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m leaving on a trip tomorrow.”

Climbing the stairs to his hotel room, Danny turned on the fan, kicked off his shoes, and dropped into bed, exhausted by the heat and discouraged by his visit to the villa. His intention was to nap for a few minutes, maybe half an hour at the most, but everything conspired against it. The crisp sheets. The breeze from the fan. The artificial twilight conjured by the closed wooden shutters.

Without wanting to, he slept for hours, and when he awoke there was a long moment of deep confusion. The hotel room had a strange, almost surreal cast to it, and he felt as if he’d slept through the night. But no. He’d fallen asleep in the late afternoon and, since then, the shuttered twilight had given way to a more pervasive darkness. Squinting at his watch, he saw that it was almost ten
P.M
. Though he wasn’t hungry, he knew that he should eat—and anyway, it wasn’t as if he could go back to sleep. He might as well go out for a beer.

Then he was walking downhill toward the restaurant and feeling the cold. One thing about the steppes—when night fell, the temperature dropped in a hurry. He supposed this was because there wasn’t anything to hold the sun’s heat. The landscape was Marilyn blond, the macadam road a characteristic gray. Most of the buildings were the color of cement, the others whitewashed. Nor was the town large enough to create its own microclimate. There were only a few cars and trucks, a streetlight here and there, fluorescent lights in houses—and that was it. So when the heat went, it was
gone
.

Soon he found his way to an outdoor café that he hadn’t noticed before. It was in a courtyard on one of the side streets. A charcoal brazier sat in one corner, its embers covered in white ash, while a television glowed on the wall. Grizzled workmen sat at sturdy wooden tables, smoking cigarettes and playing cards. Danny recognized a couple of people—one of the boys from the carpet shop, the waiter from the restaurant, some men he’d buttonholed to ask about Remy Barzan.

With a nod to the locals, he took a table near the hibachi and ordered a bottle of Efes Pilsen. Then he leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the sky, expecting to be blown away by the kind of starscape that you can only see in the distant boondocks. But no. The night was gauzy with dust, the stars smudged and faded.

Which was more or less the way he felt himself. He’d spent most of the day sticking his head in doorways and making a general nuisance of himself. The visit to the villa had been a washout, and now . . . if Remy Barzan was in Uzelyurt, it was a bigger secret than the Manhattan Project.

Which left him . . . where? On the morning bus to Diyarbakir. From there, it was a short flight to Istanbul. But what was the point? He’d learned nothing in Turkey—except that he was tapped out. Istanbul was no better than Uzelyurt or Washington. He’d try Oslo, sure, but he wasn’t optimistic. After that there were no more leads to follow, so the only thing left to do was . . .

Run.

It was all he could do. But how long could that last? Sooner or later—in fact, sooner—he’d run out of money, and Zebek would close in. It wouldn’t be all that hard. He’d probably use Fellner Associates. As Danny knew, Fellner was good at finding people who didn’t want to be found. He’d worked a couple of the cases himself: an accountant who’d looted his clients’ assets, a husband who’d taken the kids to Paraguay. So it wouldn’t take long. And Zebek’s instructions would be short and sweet:
Let us know where he is, and we’ll take it from there.

I’m a dead man,
Danny thought.

In the end, he had three beers rather than one and left the café a few minutes before midnight. Though he wasn’t conscious of making any decisions, he found that he had. Forget Oslo. He could hunt down this Rolvaag guy on the telephone, on the Net—not that he believed it would go anywhere. Rolvaag was probably dead.

Danny’s plan was to catch the bus in the morning, fly to Istanbul, and take the first flight to Washington. There, at least he’d be on his home turf. And who knows? If he went to the police and made a lot of noise, maybe Zebek would back off.

He could feel his mood begin to lift. It was the beer, of course, but it was also the prospect of seeing Caleigh again. Passing a ragged little park with stunted pine trees, he suddenly realized how dark it was. Most of the light came from a crescent moon. Working streetlights were few and far between. Most of them seemed to have been vandalized: bouquets of wire fanned out from the tops of the standards, where the fixtures should have been. In all likelihood, that was the municipality’s doing. Electricity was expensive in Turkey—you could tell from the prevalence of solar panels, fluorescent bulbs, and . . . darkness.

A tractor rumbled by and then a dump truck with a busted muffler. He passed some teenage kids playing a game that might have been tag. He paused to watch, but they were hard to see, tearing around in the dark, hooting and jeering, giggling.

At the foot of the hill leading up to the hotel, he passed a dry-goods store. Like everything else, it was closed, but it had an open feel, despite that. Its goods were still outside and still on display. Kettles and washboards, colanders and toilet brushes, candles and bicycle tires—and a lot more—were looped together with a length of chain and hung above the doorway.

It’s like being in a ghost town,
Danny thought,
only I’m the ghost.

A black Mercedes glided downhill on the other side of the road, the thin light of a street lamp sliding over its hood. As the car passed, it seemed to slow, and Danny hesitated, thinking that he’d been mistaken for a local—and that, in a moment, the window would roll down and the driver would ask him for directions. He was getting ready to shrug an apology when the Mercedes suddenly picked up speed and and he realized he’d made a terrible mistake.

FIFTEEN

He’d heard it a million times. Everybody had. Whether it was a semi jackknifing on the interstate or a purse snatching on a downtown street, everyone agreed on one thing:
It happened so fast!
That’s what they said. And they were right. They were always right.

The Mercedes went from zero to fast in an instant, tires squealing as it swung into a U-turn that ended prematurely as a J-, blocking the street in front of him. There wasn’t any time to react. He turned in time to see another car rock to a stop at the curb, just behind him. Doors flew open. Men jumped out. Reflexively he took a step backward and had started to turn when an arm curled around his neck and jerked him off his feet. Dragged toward the Mercedes, he lashed out with his foot, connected with something soft, and drew a yelp of pain. Then he was wrestled into the backseat and shoved to the floor. A knee came down hard against his spine and stayed there.

The car was roaring uphill on its way out of town, accelerating into the darkness. Angry and scared, Danny struggled to his hands and knees, then crashed back down to the carpet when a fist slammed into his ear. A shower of lights shot through his vision. Pain pressed against the back of his eyes.

A voice whispered, “You move, I cut you.” He could feel the tip of a knife against the skin under his jaw. There was nothing he could do.

The air went out of him, and he subsided against the carpeting. Someone wrenched his arms behind his back and bound his hands with plastic cuffs. Then, nothing. He lay there on the floor, listening to his heart pound, the carpet’s synthetic smell filling his nostrils. He had no idea where they were taking him. To a cave or to one of the gorges that he’d seen on the way into Uzelyurt. Some dark place where they could kill him and dump him without a fuss.

He didn’t hear anything for what seemed like a long while—just the whir of the tires and the engine’s muffled roar. A lyric from an old Dylan song went round and round in his head, like a roulette ball that wouldn’t quit:

There must be some way outta here,
Said the Joker to the Priest . . .

The line might have been funny if he wasn’t so scared. But he was—he was
so
scared. And not just of dying. Zebek had a way of killing people that gave dying a bad name.

Suddenly the car swerved to the right, rumbling over a washboarded surface onto a long stretch of gravel. Danny could hear the pebbles pinging off the undercarriage. Then the driver braked, the car slid, and a rush of adrenaline slammed through his heart.
This is it,
he thought.
This is how it ends. At night, in the cold, on the side of the road. Soon I’m going to be garbage.

A whiff of garlic and his captor’s breath, hot against his ear. “Nothing,” the man whispered. Danny stayed where he was, crumpled on the floor with the cool blade of a knife pressed against his throat. The seconds crawled by as if they were minutes.

Then the driver’s door opened. There was a rush of cold air and a burst of Turkish. The man with the knife grabbed Danny by the shirt collar and pulled him up into a sitting position. There was only enough time for a glance. He saw the back of someone’s head, a beam of light through the windshield, shapes. He said, “Wha—” and then someone clapped a strip of duct tape over his mouth and a pillowcase fell over his head. Finally, a cord tightened the hood around his neck, and he was dragged out of the car.

The pillowcase smelled like soap.

An arm went round his shoulders and pulled him close. “Listen to me—
buhhh-ddy
.”

Danny stiffened, recognizing the voice. The guy from the carpet shop! He was sure of it.

“Be cool,” the man was saying in a soothing voice. “Don’t fight it, okay? You fight, and I’m gonna have to give you a shot. I don’t want to do that, y’know? With Ketamine, you get sick, you vomit—you could drown. So be cool, okay?”

Danny nodded. Mumbled. Swayed where he was standing.

“We’re going to put you in a truck. So maybe it gets a little rough, y’know?”

Danny’s stomach folded into a knot.

When he was a kid, his older brothers used to torture him in the good-natured way that siblings do. Once, they put him in a cardboard box, sealed it up, and tumbled him down a steep hill. (He’d gotten a concussion.) Another time, when the family visited a Civil War fort in Maine, his brothers dangled him over the edge of the ramparts, with the ocean foaming onto the rocks below. Kev had one leg, Sean the other, and it cracked them up, pretending they were losing their grip. “Uh-ohhh—almost lost him that time.”

In their defense, they never let anyone else pick on him. On the contrary. But their persecution taught him a lesson: Giving in never gets you anywhere. Giving in just makes it easier for someone to mess with you. That’s why he hit Kevin with a roll of quarters that night, came up behind him and hit him so hard it was scary, hit him even though he knew he’d get pounded. You had to make it hard on people who wanted to hurt you. You had to make them think twice.

He kept his brothers in mind as the Buddy/Buddy Guy talked about how important it was to stay calm. But the way Danny saw it, it wasn’t important at all. He was as good as dead. Whether he drowned in his own vomit or was beaten to death in the boondocks was six of one and half a dozen of the other. So he didn’t have anything to lose when he locked in on Buddy/Buddy’s voice and, taking a step forward, drove his forehead down into what he hoped was the bridge of the other man’s nose.

There was a satisfying crack, a bark of pain, and . . . a cherry bomb went off in his brain. He saw the flash, felt his head explode, found the darkness.

When he came to, a minute or an hour or a day later, he couldn’t figure out where he was—or even where he
could
be. Somewhere hot. He was soaked with sweat. And there was a kind of rushing noise that seemed to be coming from inside his head. His hands were bound behind his back, and he couldn’t see anything. The pillowcase was still in place, as was the duct tape. Still, he could tell that he was in an enclosure of some kind. A box or . . .

Then it hit him, and a geyser of terror sparked through his chest. His body arched, and he flailed like a fish on the deck of a boat, flopping this way and that in a seizure of pure fear.
I’m buried alive.

Only he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. The noise. It wasn’t coming from his head. It was coming from an engine. It was road noise, and, wherever he was, he was moving. He was in a car, then, or a truck. In the trunk or under the chassis.

Slowly he began to calm down. And as he did, his other senses started to function. He could smell hot metal, oil, diesel exhaust. Once in a while, a pebble pinged against the metal underneath him. Less often, when the driver braked or turned, Danny’s body rolled or slid, sent this way and that at the mercy of Newtonian forces that he could neither anticipate nor resist. A couple of times the truck—it had to be a truck—hit a bump and sent his body careening against the sides of his container. In this way, he was able to work out the dimensions of the thing that held him. It was, he figured, about the size of a coffin.

But it wasn’t a coffin, he told himself. For one thing, it was made of metal. And it seemed to be suspended from the undercarriage of a truck. Whatever the container was, it was stifling inside—so much so that it took all of Danny’s willpower to suppress the panic in his heart.
I can’t breathe. There isn’t enough air.

He gnawed at the duct tape over his mouth, hoping to bite through it to the air, but the task was impossible. The taste in his mouth was a rubbery, chemical mess. Nauseated and breathing through his nose, Danny felt his consciousness begin to flicker. The darkness intensified, and then . . .

The truck came to a stop. Or maybe it was already stopped. He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t be sure if he’d experienced the truck slowing to a halt or if he’d woken to find that the prison in which he found himself was suddenly at rest. In either case, he felt the silence as a kind of free fall, as if the ground had fallen away from beneath him. The engine’s roar had been his only reference point and context. Now, he was alone and
at rest
.

His heart stumbled.

Then he heard the doors of the truck open. Voices. The engine ticking as it cooled. At first, he thought that they’d arrived at their destination, that they’d be coming to get him at any moment, but then he understood (although he wasn’t sure how) that the truck was at a checkpoint. He tried shouting, but the noise stayed in his head. He rolled against the sides of the container, but there wasn’t enough room, really, to make any noise. Then the engine roared to life as suddenly as it had stopped. Gears ground, and they were moving again.

He felt sick. Entrained by the engine, his body trembled uncontrollably. His head was pounding, and his stomach heaved. Panic came at him in waves. He worried that there wasn’t enough air and then that he’d throw up and drown—just as his buddy from the carpet shop had warned.
He should have listened
. Sweat rolled off his temples and stung his eyes. He was completely dehydrated. He was soaking wet.

It occurred to him that he would probably die before his captors could kill him.

Sooner or later,
he thought,
they have to let me out—so they can kill me. So that’s when I’ll make my move,
he decided.
When they pull me out of the truck, I’ll make my move.

He rocked on for a while, holding that thought. Then asked himself:
So what’s my “move”? I’m handcuffed and blindfolded. The most I can do is throw up and fall down—which doesn’t really count as a “move.” So, maybe my move is, I’m all outta moves.

He thought about where they might be going and why they hadn’t killed him already. It didn’t make sense—unless they had something “special” in mind.
Don’t go there,
he told himself.
Don’t even think about it. Think about . . . Washington. Your friends and colleagues.

He could imagine the scene at the gallery, with Ian in rapt conversation with the Earring Lady. What was her name? She always wore huge dangling earrings. It irritated him unreasonably that he couldn’t remember her name. He could imagine the Earring Lady asking about him:
Whatever happened to Danny Cray? Such a nice boy!

And Ian, looking pained:
You didn’t hear? They found him—migod, he was skinned alive. In Turkey or some such place! His girlfriend was devastated—of course! I mean, you can imagine. But she’s moved on.

He giggled. Sobbed. Lost track of what he’d been thinking. In the roaring darkness of the container, Danny’s lucidity came and went, as if there were a loose connection in his brain. Time passed—in clumps—until a torrent of gravel flew up against the truck’s undercarriage, creating a thunderous racket. Danny felt the driver brake and the truck crunch to a stop.

This is it!

He heard a chain dragged through the shackle of a lock, then stiffened as someone’s hands grasped him under the arms and dragged him into the cool night air. Where he stood, swaying blindly from side to side. It was definitely time for his move, but he was having trouble staying on his feet. He lost the battle, his legs buckled, and he sank to his knees like a priest at prayer.

He was thinking,
I won’t hear the shot. I won’t even feel it.
He imagined the exit wound, the tumbling cartridge blowing out his eye. Then someone took him by the arm and jerked him to his feet. Stumbling over the rough ground, he went where he was led. A door creaked open on its hinges, and he was guided to a straight-backed chair. Someone cut the plastic cuffs from his wrists, then used a roll of duct tape to lash his arms to the sides of the chair. A second person tied his ankles to the chair’s legs, using the same material.

Then the hood was jerked from his head and the tape was stripped from his mouth. The cold oxygen-rich air sent a charge of euphoria through him. But it didn’t last. As uncomfortable as the hood had been, it had served a purpose that might be construed as benign. So long as his captors took precautions against being seen, there was at least some hope that he might be released.

No more.

Reluctantly he raised his head. There were two men in the room with him. One was, as he’d expected, his old pal from the carpet shop—the Buddy/Buddy Guy. With a bruised cheek. He touched it, his face expressionless, as Danny looked at him.

The other man was thirty or so and the taller of the two. Clean-shaven and handsome, he wore a knitted skullcap, a faded-to-pink Chicago Bulls T-shirt, khakis, and a pair of running shoes. When the man turned his back, Danny was surprised to see that the name on the shirt was Kukoc, not Jordan.

The room was small, with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls. There was a bare cot, a couple of mismatched chairs, and a dilapidated kilim on the far wall. Overhead, a fluorescent coil simmered and popped. That was it, except for a tool bench in the corner and strips of fly paper, peppered with insects.

“Tough ride, huh?”

It was the guy in the Chicago Bulls shirt. A smile played on his lips in a way that didn’t seem friendly.

When Danny didn’t respond, “Kukoc” became expansive. “We don’t usually move people like that. It’s for . . .
goods
, you know? For people, there’s a special truck—got a toilet and everything. Only right now, it’s in Bucharest.” He shrugged. “You use what you got, y’know?”

It was a rhetorical question, and Danny ignored it. He was trying to find out if there was any wiggle room in the tapes that bound him to the chair. There wasn’t.

Kukoc leaned in. “Hey! Home-of-the-Brave—wake up.” He had fathomless brown eyes. “I ask, you answer. That way, everybody gets along!” When Danny didn’t reply, Kukoc shook his head in disbelief. “You fuck with me?”

Danny sighed. No matter what he said, he was going to get hit. (At best.) It was just a matter of time. So he gave in—not to Kukoc, but to that part of himself that was forever in junior high school. When someone got in your face, you stepped up. That’s just the way it worked. That’s what you did if you didn’t want to run and hide forever. So he said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you suck my dick—” He was about to add “and we’ll find out,” but he never got that far. He heard the Buddy/Buddy Guy snort in disbelief. Then Kukoc swung for the bleachers, landing a punch that drove Danny’s front teeth straight through his lip.