Cost of Life (19 page)

Armed with that solid list of names, Hayley assumed the process of connecting them with backstories would be easy. She had at her disposal, after all, the greatest detection tool ever invented: an Internet search engine. Plus she had access—albeit temporarily—to DIVS, the FBI's swanky Data Integration and Visualization System. If any of these ten men had a birth certificate, a driver's license, or even a passport, she'd be able to match them.

Except she hadn't been able to match any of them.

“It doesn't make sense,” she muttered.

Angelo Potter, who sat in the workstation beside her, angled his hangdog expression in her general direction and replied, “Welcome to the world, kid.”

“No, I mean, these men—at least their arrest records should come up.”

“Maybe the list is bogus.”

“That's not a possibility I'm even going to think about.”

Because if that was true, an old man was in critical care for nothing.

“Kid, why don't you take a lunch break?”

“I'll eat when I've figured this out,” she insisted and adjusted the oxygen tube around her ears. Her eyes were drying out from staring at the screen. She reached for a Kleenex to rub them. In doing so, she once again caught sight of the list of names and the dark blood blotching its corner….

No. That was a trick of the light. Xana in her temper tantrum had burned the bloody envelope. This one was stained only by an errant shadow.

Hayley touched the shadow. The tip of her finger vanished into darkness.

“Do you know who he is?” she asked Angelo. “The Russian who runs the pawnshop?”

Angelo sighed. “Can you be a little more specific?”

“I know his name isn't really Yuri.”

“Who is he? A defector from the Cold War?”

“Were you even alive during the Cold War?”

“I've read about it.”

“Oh for the love of Christ.”

“So who is he?”

“Why does it matter?”

Why was Hayley feeling so guilty? She wasn't the one who pummeled the poor guy. True, she had lied to the special-agent-in-charge about what had happened, but…

But she had lied to him.

Why?

If anyone had earned her loyalty, it was Jim Christie and not Xana Marx, and yet she had covered Xana's ass and without hesitation.

Why?

It couldn't be because a small part of her hoped violent coercion was justified, could it?

“Well,” she said, “I just…don't you think someone should call the hospital and find out how he's doing?”

“I'll get right on that, kid, the minute you go to lunch.”

“I told you: I'll go to lunch when I've figured this out.”

“Then figure it out.”

Hayley huffed in vexation.

Angelo stood up and leaned over his cubicle toward her. “Look, kid, it's not as if you're the only person working the list. I guarantee you there's a room full of analysts up in DC going through each of those names. Heck, they might have even matched them up. It's not as if they'd call us and let us know. So why don't you go to lunch? I'll buy you a sandwich in the commissary.”

“The commissary is closed.”

“I hate my life.”

Angelo shuffled off toward the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked him.

“Can't tell you. Plausible deniability.”

The door shut behind him with a click, leaving Hayley with no choice, none at all, but to resume her fruitless dirt-digging on the ten names.

Rather than repeat what she already knew didn't work, Hayley instead decided to submerge herself in the context of the names. She typed in the name of that mysterious Russian prison, filtered out the results to recent history, and got to reading the text on the screen. The computer's web browser did a decent job translating from Chechen or Russian or whatever the native language of this information was, but decent was a far cry from fluent.

Most of the hits brought up pages from what appeared to be a muckraking Chechen webzine called
God's Voice
and written by journalists with monikers like TheSparrow and AntiShit. The webzine itself was bare-bones, but the articles ran for thousands of words each and were electric with indignation at the government.

One sample essay from August 4, 2002, was titled “What Price Slavery? What Price Freedom?” and its thesis, as far as Hayley could tell, was to establish a parallel between the oppressed Chechen people and oppressed black Americans under Jim Crow laws. Another postulated an equivalency between the oppressed Chechen people and Jews under Nazi Germany. The common thread seemed to be the notion of reparations.

Hayley thought about that for a moment.

Her cancer had first presented itself as a warm lump on her back that she had noticed one morning while taking a shower. At first the lump hadn't been painful. She chose to ignore it.

The soreness began a few days later, so she reacted the way she believed an adult would: She downed some ibuprofen and made no mention of it, not even when the soreness had inflamed into real pain, the kind that made it difficult to concentrate.

She became scared.

She had every intention of telling her parents.

She was just waiting for the right time.

Then one night, around 4
A.M.,
her left arm snapped between the elbow and the wrist. Had she fallen out of bed? No. She had merely turned over on it in her sleep.

That was when she told her parents.

The doctors at Northside Hospital drew her blood. They put her in the ICU. They subjected her to X-rays and a CAT scan and a PET scan and even a bone scan, which required them to inject her with a radioactive acid.

The biopsy came next.

The diagnosis followed shortly thereafter.

Her first oncologist, the one who performed the biopsy, the one who sat her down with her parents in his art deco office, always had a pleasant look in his eyes, even when he was delivering bleak news. After he got transferred up to Sloan Kettering, Hayley was moved to a second oncologist in the same practice at Northside. Her second oncologist always had a bleak look in his eyes, even when he was delivering pleasant news.

Hayley underwent twenty-four rounds of chemotherapy. At the start, she tried to separate her mind from her body. Her body was sick but her mind remained clean of illness. She would be dry-heaving until she hyperventilated but she reminded herself that it was only her body that was suffering. She would be coughing for hours on end until wet red particles from her lungs sprinkled the dehumidified air in front of her lips, but those lungs and lips belonged to her body. She lost sensation in the tips of her fingers due to neuropathy, but her mind was clean of illness.

Then she started to forget the names of her teachers. She forgot how to spell words like
soup
and
Sunday.
She found herself staring at homework assignments and not remembering what the assignment was or what class it was for. Her oncologist assured her that short-term memory loss was a common side effect of her chemotherapy drugs.

“Then put me on different drugs,” she had said.

The new drug cocktail was not as strong and not as effective. Her neuropathy progressed. Her cancer marker trickled up. She required the use of an oxygen tank by her side at all times.

But her mind regained some of its alertness.

Some. But not all.

“So,” she muttered to the screen, “what kind of reparations do you think I deserve?”

Except she knew it was bullshit. What happened, happened, and no amount of money could fix the past. History was beyond one's control, but the future wasn't. And so, rather than dwell on her bad luck, Hayley walked the stage at her high school commencement along with everyone else. Soon, she was going to die, but in the meantime, she was going to intern at the FBI. How about that, TheSparrow? What do you have to say to that, AntiShit?

The
God's Voice
posts ended around 2007. Hayley went back to her search results and reordered them with the most recent appearing at the top. Here she came upon an item from Interpol released to all major intelligence agencies regarding the voluntary surrender of—

“Eat,” said Angelo, and he placed a paper plate beside her keyboard and on the paper plate—oh my—three slices of American cheese drooling in between the crusts of perfectly browned white bread.

She hesitated. “Did you break into the commissary?”

“Plausible deniability.” He had a half-eaten sandwich of his own in his hands. “Eat.”

Truth be told, she was starving.

She took three large bites.

He handed her a can of Diet Coke.

She smiled, cracked it open, and washed the delicious chunks of grilled cheese down her gullet.

Angelo glanced over her shoulder. “Solved all the problems of the world yet?”

“No,” she replied, “but I did find this.”

She pointed at the Interpol release:

On January 1 of this year, a chief strategist for the Ichkeria Republic, the unofficial name for the unofficial secessionist party of Chechnya, interrupted a prayer session at the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque in Grozny to turn himself in. In exchange for a waiver of the death penalty, he pled guilty to sixty-five counts of treason, nineteen counts of murder, seventeen counts of conspiracy to commit murder, eleven counts of arson, eleven counts of malicious mischief, and four counts of sabotage. On January 15, he was sentenced to fifty-one consecutive life sentences at The Ophrichnina.

“Does it say why he turned himself in?” asked Angelo.

“No, but that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is his name.”

Angelo peered closer at the screen. “ ‘Zviad Daudov.' ”

Hayley picked up the slip of paper and pointed to the third name.

“ ‘Bislan Daudov,' ” Angelo read aloud. He took a moment to process the information. “Could they be related?”

“I don't know. All evidence of the name Bislan Daudov has been wiped clean off the database. But the bottom of the Interpol release has a link to Zviad's dossier.”

She clicked the link.

She and Angelo scanned the dossier.

And there it was, halfway down the page, the answer that had been so elusive, the answer that could potentially change everything.

There it was.

“We need to call Jim Christie,” said Angelo.

Hayley picked up the phone and dialed his mobile number. She put it on speakerphone.

Angelo took another bite out of his sandwich.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Impatient, Hayley tapped her fingers against the desk.

Ring.

“He's probably busy with—”

A female voice cut in: “Hello?”

Xana Marx? What was she doing with Jim's phone?

And what was all that shouting in the background?

Nine minutes earlier, Jim and Xana had walked into the airport substation. They were not the only visitors here to see Lieutenant Dundee.

“Les Kramer,” said the tall, gaunt man in the chinos. “US Marshal.”

Marshal Kramer was here to transport the Chechen prisoner for pretrial to the federal penitentiary some ten minutes up I-85. He just needed the LT's signature to authorize the handoff.

Officer Chiles had all the paperwork ready. She had already radioed Dundee on the walkie and assured Kramer that he would not be long. When Chiles spoke, she spoke to the floor, not because the marshal was so obviously tall but because Chiles was so obviously smitten.

“Guess we'll have to wait in line,” said Jim. He adjusted the belt on his low-riding slacks. Someday he was going to lose all this excess weight. He had once been in good shape—or if not good shape at least good enough to pass the physical at the FBI Academy. Sometimes it took him a full ten minutes after waking up to remember that he had become fat and old. Those were his favorite ten minutes of the day.

Xana, meanwhile, was getting examined by Marshal Kramer. The tall man had cocked his head southward and was peering at her as if she were a three-eyed trout.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Now, now,” crowed Lieutenant Dundee from the doorway, “don't lie. He may not know you, but he recognizes you. Want me to tell him or should you?”

Dundee stepped into his squad room. He had a Granny Smith in one hand and his paring knife in the other and a shit-eating grin goosing the cheeks of his face.

Officer Chiles headed her boss off at the pass and handed him the authorization forms for him to sign. He propped the apple between his jaws and used the tip of his knife as a tracking tool to help him read the forms.

“You still want me to apologize to that?” Xana muttered to Jim.

Dundee handed the forms back to Chiles, took a bite out of his apple, and said, mouth full of fruit, “Since when does a marshal need two feebs to escort a prisoner to lockup?”

“Lieutenant, we're actually here on a separate matter,” said Jim, who then identified himself.

“Yeah, I imagine you are.” Dundee winked at Xana and then reached into his breast pocket for his ballpoint pen. “I'll be with you two in a second.”

He signed Marshal Kramer's forms and handed them to him. Chiles followed the tall marshal into the interview room to retrieve the quarry; any excuse to spend more time with the tall marshal was a fine excuse for Officer Chiles.

Dundee sliced across his apple with the flat blade of his Swiss Army knife and deposited the fresh-cut chunk into his mouth.

“How about it, darling?” he said to Xana. “You got something you want to say to me?”

Xana stepped forward, bowed her head, and spoke:

“I'm sorry…”

“Keep going. Tell Elvis Dundee what you're sorry for.”

He tossed the apple core into the nearest bin. A teardrop of juice dribbled down his jaw.

She spoke again:

“I'm sorry for your mother.”

Dundee frowned. “Come again?”

“How she must suffer, every day, knowing she's responsible for birthing into this world such a self-centered, chauvinistic asstard.”

Jim sighed. “Xana…”

“I give you mercy and you throw it back in my face?” Dundee put his knife down on the desk and unhooked his handcuffs. “Pride goeth before a fall, woman. And you just fell for good.”

As he turned her around and snapped the bracelets on her wrists, Xana found herself face-to-face with Jim Christie. The ten-ton look of disappointment in his eyes said it all.

What she didn't know—what she couldn't know—was that the disappointment Jim felt was mostly directed inward. How could he be upset with a wolf for behaving like a wolf? No. He was to blame for thinking he could get a wolf to be a lapdog.

At the very moment Lieutenant Dundee opened his apple-wet mouth to recite Xana's rights, Marshal Kramer appeared, with Giant Nezh behind him and Officer Chiles bringing up the rear. Like Xana, Giant Nezh had his wrists bound behind his back; unlike Xana, his wrists were bound with nylon zip-ties. And perhaps it was the sight of this shrew of a woman who had badgered him not too long ago or perhaps it was the sight of this shrew so absolutely incapacitated, but whatever the case:

Giant Nezh charged toward Xana like a bull, yelling at a thunderous volume as he advanced across the tiled floor, ready to ram his head through her shirt and through her rib cage and then straight through her shrewish heart.

Jim Christie pushed Xana aside and stepped into the path of the violence and felt the Chechen's skull cannonball into his soft fat belly. Both men were knocked windless and stumbling. Giant Nezh backed into a nearby desk and then was shoved to the floor by the tall, angry marshal.

Meanwhile, Jim coughed up a handful of coffee-colored bile.

“Jesus, Jim,” said Xana, “are you OK?”

He gave her a thumbs-up and then coughed up another handful of coffee-colored bile. Dundee and Chiles scabbarded their sidearms. Jim coughed again and Xana implored Chiles to get the man some water.

“I'd do it myself,” Xana added, “but some asstard cuffed me. What are you smiling about?”

Because the asshole who cuffed her
was
smiling. In fact, Lieutenant Dundee appeared positively sunny.

“Don't you get it?” he said. “You chatted with the prisoner for five minutes. Five minutes! Think about that. Only five minutes was enough to send this guy's blood boiling so hot that he tried to kill you in a room full of armed men. Lady, if you can't see the moral in that, you're even worse off than I thought.”

Jim swallowed down Chiles's water in one gulp and gratefully exhaled. She asked him if he wanted more. He shook his head.

Xana turned to Jim. She wanted to give the big man a hug, but with her wrists bound she couldn't even pat him on the shoulder. The best she could do was look him in the eye and once again ask him if he was OK.

“Yeah.” His eyes were still watery from his coughing fit. “I'll be fine.”

“You didn't have to do that, you know.”

Jim shrugged. “It seemed like the chivalrous thing to do at the time.”

“It was stupid.”

“Chivalry usually is.” His grin faded. “Anyway, listen, I know a lawyer—a friend from high school—he works probation cases all the time. He might be able to help you out with this.”

Xana thanked him.

But she didn't believe him.

She was fucked.

Dundee the Chauvinistic Asstard had been dead-on about her pride. With years in prison on the line, it would have been the simplest, most sensible thing in the world to be contrite, but not her, not the great Xana Marx, no. Simple contrition was beyond the grasp of her vast talents.

Although speaking of vast talents, Dundee the Asstard was now walking a slow circle around a nearby desk. Why the man was doing this was beyond her comprehension.

“Up we go,” said Kramer. Officer Chiles helped him raise Giant Nezh to his feet. “Next time you try something like that, you get Old Sparky.”

“I don't think he speaks English,” Chiles mentioned.

Kramer patted his holstered Taser. “Everybody speaks Old Sparky.”

Meanwhile, Jim Christie felt awful. His throat was clogged with acid and his stomach was sore to the touch. Eventually he would have to check the bruise out. He hazarded to guess which exact shade of yellow-blue the skin around his belly had become.

But it was a small price to pay for chivalry.

Stupid, yes, but to have been able to do that, and for her, for Xana, well…he would be floating on that cloud for weeks…provided he didn't die first from internal bleeding. Yeah, after the press conference, he really needed to get himself to a hospital. And speaking of the press conference, it was just about time to hit the road…

Except there was Lieutenant Dundee, on his knees, peering under the desk, utterly clownish.

“Jesus Christ, man,” said Xana, “what are you looking for? Your dignity? Your balls? It better not be the key to these handcuffs…”

Dundee glared up at her. “Did you take it?”

“Did I take what?”

“My knife. I know you saw me put it down right here…”

The knife.

Officer Chiles had been correct. Giant Nezh didn't speak English. But he could read expressions and he recognized the dawning expressions on the two federal agents' faces. Giant Nezh had wanted to wait until he and the marshal were on the road before acting, but he had already slashed his nylon bonds with the knife he had filched after head-butting Jim Christie.

The head-butting had been a ruse anyway to retrieve the knife, although how much sweeter it would have been to cause pain to that shrew who spoke his language, who claimed to know him but who knew nothing, nothing at all, and would be dead in a few seconds anyway—but first, Giant Nezh had to upgrade his choice of weaponry.

So before the feds could shout a warning, he plugged the knife into the major artery under Marshal Kramer's ear while, with his free hand, snatching Marshal Kramer's pistol from its leather pocket.

Ooh, a Glock 22. Fifteen rounds.

That would work.

The shrew had chided him for using a high-caliber weapon to kill that traffic cop but as a football player walked around with weights in his shoes to increase his leg strength, so too did Giant Nezh carry that hand cannon for moments like this. The Glock felt so light, so easy to handle. He had no problem shooting Officer Chiles in the forehead, Jim Christie in the chest, and then Lieutenant Dundee in the left eye, and all on the same breath.

The shrew had ducked behind one of the desks. So what. Giant Nezh had already taken out everyone in the squad room who was armed and even if she reached one of their guns, it wasn't as if she could make any use of them with her arms tied behind her back.

Ha!

As he advanced toward her shelter, he wondered what sort of idiocy led her to being arrested. She had probably assumed that being arrested would be the low point of her day.

Ha!

But then a dozen or so Georgia National Guardsmen from the other side of the stationhouse's glass doors perforated the glass doors—and Giant Nezh's organs—with a hundred or so cylinders of copper-colored iron.