Jet (17 page)

“Oh, sure. Of course,” the cop said, glancing at the first one. “Let’s have a look inside, then, and you can be on your way.”

Anatoly tried again. “I was telling your partner that we’re in kind of a hurry…”

“I’m sure you are. So open up and we can get this over with,” the officer interrupted.

“I’ve got to get the keys,” Valery said with a resigned shrug. “They’re in the cabin.”

“You keep an old refrigeration compartment locked?”

“It’s the company’s rules. I just drive.”

Valery removed his hands from his jacket, the right one clutching a pistol, and fired twice. The cop in the trailer pitched forward onto the ground, his flashlight clattering beside him. The other officer was turning toward Valery when he shot him through the temple from only a few feet away. The cop dropped lifelessly as Anatoly gaped open-mouthed at the spectacle.

Valery covered the ground to where the first cop was lying facedown and fired into the back of his head. He replaced the pistol in his pocket and bent down to grab the man’s hands. “Take the other one. We’ll throw them into the truck and drive it into a gulch where it won’t be spotted for days. Hurry up.”

Anatoly didn’t need to be told twice and scurried over to the dead cop, ignoring the splatter of blood beside him, and dragged him to the idling truck.

Fifteen minutes later they were bouncing down the road again, Anatoly visibly shaken as the glow of Tynda’s lights illuminated the horizon. Valery eyed his cell phone and confirmed it had a signal, and then placed a call.

Rudolf’s voice answered on the third ring. “What?”

“We had a problem.” Valery described the situation with clipped precision. When he was finished, Rudolf was silent for several long beats.

“You’re to drive all night. By morning you’ll have put, what, four hundred kilometers between you and the bodies?”

“Yes. That’s the plan. But you might want to get someone from the base to clean up after us, just in case.”

“I’ll look into it, but we’re out of time. I spoke with the client. The shipment needs to be at the docks in three days, not seven.”

Valery did a quick calculation. “If we don’t have any more problems, it can be done. It will be difficult, but it’s possible.”

“I don’t pay you to disappoint me.”

“We’ll drive in shifts and be there in three days.”

“Good. Keep me informed of your progress, and I’ll have someone meet you at the port.”

“And the cops?”

“Let me see what I can arrange.”

Câmpulung Moldovenesc, Romania

Matt held Hannah’s hand as they walked up the rock pathway to the inn he and Jet had agreed to use as a base camp in the event of an emergency. Since evading the gypsies, they’d snatched sleep where they could, a few hours at a time, always on the move before they attracted unwanted attention. The day had gone by quickly, and dusk was falling when Matt rolled up the cobblestone drive to the hotel and parked just out of sight of the office.

The exterior of the inn had captured Jet’s fancy on a trip they’d taken eight months earlier, when the rolling hills around it had been dusted with snow, the air crisp with the snap of winter. It resembled a Tyrolean ski lodge with its high wooden-beamed ceilings and distinctive façade, but was far enough off the beaten track to be a perfect place for them to lie low. Jet had been delighted that the owners seemed completely uninterested in any identification; their cash payment had been gladly accepted with whatever name they wished to sign in the register.

Seeing the amber glow from the oversized windows and the inviting wood-trimmed doorway, Matt felt a sense of palpable relief that their journey, at least for now, was over. He’d checked his email regularly during the day, but there had been no messages, and his agitation had grown as the hours had crawled by. He’d done his best to conceal his discomfiture from Hannah, but like her mother, she seemed to have a sixth sense that enabled her to read Matt like a dime novel, and her anxiety had steadily grown to match his.

“Remember this place?” Matt asked. Hannah had been with them when they’d driven across Romania, and it had been recent enough so that even in the short timeline of her existence, she might.

“Mama here?” Hannah chirped hopefully.

“Not yet. But soon, I hope.”

“Why no Mama?”

“I’m sure she’s doing her best. It’s a long trip. Look at how long we’ve been driving.” He paused, eager to change the subject. “Are you hungry?”

She looked at him with a doubtful expression, as though she knew what he was trying to do, and allowed a small nod.

Matt grunted. “Let’s get checked into a room, and then we’ll have a big dinner with anything you want. It’ll be like your birthday.”

“Not my birthday yet.”

He squeezed her little hand. “I know. But we can have a little party like it is. Why not? Cake, ice cream, the works.”

“Not. My. Birthday,” Hannah proclaimed again, as if to confirm that she wouldn’t be tricked so easily.

“Right. Well, maybe it’s mine. You ever think of that?”

Her eyebrows rose.

He smiled and waggled his. “Anything’s possible.”

The innkeeper could have stepped from a postcard. The woman’s wizened face was exactly as Matt remembered it, her hand-knit tan sweater and homemade floor-length blue skirt likely the same style and material her mother had worn and her grandmother before her. He was struck by the sensation of time having stood still in the Transylvanian mountains as generations lived, loved, fought, and died with nothing much changing as one century passed into the next.

He took note of the sign behind the woman that advised guests of the inn’s Internet password for the day and revised his impression, though only slightly. Technology might march inexorably forward, but the character of the people didn’t in this region of the world.

He paid for the room in the local currency, and when the innkeeper asked in halting English how many nights he wanted the room for, he replied three. His arrangement with Jet had been that whoever made it to the inn was to stay for only seventy-two hours, and if no word was received, should move on, assuming that the other was lost to them. At the time they’d discussed the morbid possibility, the chances of the unthinkable ever coming to pass had seemed remote, but now in his memory he could see, hear, and smell every moment of his time at the inn with Jet.

The old woman was oblivious to the drama playing out in Matt’s head, and he waited patiently as she made change and selected a key with a wooden cross attached to it and slid it across the counter to him. He pantomimed eating with his hands and raised his eyebrows, to inquire whether the inn was serving food that evening, and she nodded towards the small dining room off the reception area, where a younger version of the innkeeper stood with one hand on her hip, waiting for a stream of customers Matt suspected rarely came.

Their room was exactly as he recalled, the wooden floor worn smooth by decades of visiting feet, the bright comforters on the beds crafted from locally spun wool, he was sure. Jet had been enchanted by the timeless quality of the place, the feeling of suspended animation within the tranquil valley, and he suspected that had prompted her to select it as their refuge of last resort.

He set out a shirt he’d bought for himself that afternoon from a roadside market and laid a change of clothes on her bed for Hannah while she was using the bathroom. A morning rummage through the camper had revealed that Jet had stocked it with enough clothing for the little girl to last a week, for which he was grateful, even if the same attention hadn’t been paid to clothes for him.

Dinner was a quiet affair, only one other table served while they ate: a German couple with nothing but unhappy frowns about the service, food, and cost even as they cleaned their plates. Matt did his best to entertain Hannah with murmured stories he invented on the spot, but she wasn’t having any of it, her usual good humor replaced by a funk Matt more than shared.

When he tucked her in for the night, she threw her arms around his neck and held him for a long time, and when she released him, her eyes were moist. Matt had to look away when she whispered the words he knew were coming.

“Miss Mama.”

He cleared his throat and swallowed hard before meeting her gaze and nodding slowly. “Me too, sweetie, me too.”

Moscow, Russia

Half an hour went by as Jet and Yulia waited in silence for the guards to return. Jet’s eyelids were drooping when a klaxon sounded through the cell block, jolting them to their feet. The siren was ear-splitting in the confined space, and they held their hands over their ears to keep from being deafened.

The cell door opened, and Yulia’s face lit up with relief. She leaned into Jet and yelled to her, “It’s him. One of our guards!”

The man backed away from the doorway and motioned for them to follow. They ran into the hall, where a second guard was casting his eyes about nervously.

The first guard screamed to them, “Come on. All hell’s breaking loose. We’ve got to move.”

They bolted down the hall to where the security door for the wing yawned open and, once through it, saw the reason the guards were so skittish. Hundreds of male inmates were milling around on the floor below, and several fights had broken out. A few of the prisoners were breaking the wooden tables in the center of the expanse and using the legs for weapons, settling scores with other prisoners or going after the hapless guards who’d been caught unawares by the sudden violence. A towering inmate with a tattooed, shaved head moved toward a guard who was blowing his whistle in a panic and slamming his truncheon indiscriminately into anyone nearby, and grabbed him from behind in a bear hug. Another convict punched the unfortunate in the stomach, sending the whistle streaking across the mob’s heads, and then they disappeared from view.

The guard who’d freed them selected a key from the ring at his belt and twisted a door open. He gestured for them to follow, and then they were rushing down a secured stairwell, the siren fading in the background, the pounding of their shoes on the stairs a rhythmic accompaniment to their labored breathing.

At the ground floor, Yulia paused expectantly, but the first guard shook his head. “No. You’ll never get out. Through the basement. Your men are waiting for you there.”

“How can we escape that way?” she demanded.

“The sewer. It’ll take hours to contain the riot. Nobody will realize you’re gone until it’s too late.”

The guard continued down another flight of steps and, once in the substructure, unlocked a heavy steel door. He pointed up at a security camera mounted in the corner. “That’s why we were late. We had to disable all the cams along the way, and we didn’t know about this one until we checked this evening and saw it on the blueprint. We’re normally never down here, just the maintenance staff.”

“Where do we go from here?” Yulia asked.

“Your men are in the pump room at the end of this corridor. Last door on the right. There’s a manhole by the back wall. Go down into the sewer and follow it until you reach a ladder about two hundred and fifty meters away. It lets out in back of an auxiliary building near a small street. From there, you’re on your own.” The guard handed them two small penlight flashlights. “Good luck.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Back to the front office. They’ll be organizing an offensive, and our absence will be missed.”

“What about the pair of guards in solitary?”

“They took off when the alarm sounded to lead the sex clients to safety.”

Jet was already down the corridor when Yulia caught up with her. “Let me go first, or my men might jump you. I passed word along you’d be coming with us, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

Jet nodded. “Fine by me.”

The pump room was unmarked, the door rusting at the edges, and when Yulia pushed it open, the room beyond it was dark, filled with the grinding hum of machinery supplying pressure to the facility above.

“It’s me. Where are you?” Yulia called out, and a male voice answered from the shadows.

“Over here.”

Yulia switched on her flashlight and Jet did the same, and they made their way to the back of the vault. The din from the pumps increased to a roar as they neared the rear of the room, where four men in prison garb watched them from behind a pressure tank. Yulia hugged each in turn and then introduced Jet. “This is Sandra. Sandra, meet Evgeny, Mikhail, Vlad, and Taras.” She looked around. “Now where’s this manhole?”

Taras pointed at a dark circle near the wall. “That’s it.”

The men lifted the heavy iron disk and shifted it aside. Yulia descended first, flashlight in one hand as she lowered herself down the slippery concrete steps to the tunnel below. When she was standing at the base, she called up. “Breathe through your mouths. It’s toxic down here.”

“The smell of freedom,” Taras said as he moved into the opening.

Vlad was next, and the others brought up the rear, Evgeny and Mikhail dragging the manhole back into place before joining them on the platform. Jet shined her beam along the tunnel, where a central canal with sewage coursing through it stretched as far as she could see. A cement walkway ran along one side, and they could all hear the sound of water pouring into the viscous fluid from chutes further down the tunnel’s length.

“This way,” Yulia said, and began making her way along the walkway. They hurried single file, the tunnel completely black except for their lamps. Evgeny stopped after a few moments to vomit, but the rest pressed on, leaving him to catch up. Jet’s eyes burned from the noxious fumes rising from the toxic canal, but she would have swum through the muck if it had been required to escape – and she’d been through worse.

They arrived at the first chute, where rainwater was pouring at high velocity, and they skirted the stream and continued along the passage, the water only somewhat diluting the river of waste. After three more rain chutes, Yulia stopped and pointed into the gloom at the faint outline of iron rungs stretching up into darkness.