Greg Rucka - Walking dead

"I'm coming back," I told her.

She'd nodded, once, as if believing my sincerity, if not the promise. The drive itself from Kobuleti to Sarp, at the border with Turkey, was only forty kilometers, but it took me the better part of two hours. I crossed on the David Mercer ID, which was the only one I'd brought along, something I was certain would become a problem for me later. While I had other IDs, they'd stayed behind, in my go-bag where they belonged. In my backpack was a change of clothes, Bakhar's address book, Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry, a smattering of toiletries, and my laptop. The only weapon I carried was a small flip knife, thinking that would be easier to explain if I found myself searched at a checkpoint or the border.

As it turned out, I probably could have brought a rocket launcher with me. Fifty euros seemed to be the going rate for just about anything illegal these days, and in Sarp it bought me a visitor's visa, and papers for the Dnepr. I took the opportunity to refuel the bike, and then it was just a question of following the coast another two hundred kilometers or so until I reached Trabzon.

It had been almost midnight when I'd reached the Zorlu Grand Hotel, the city's finest accommodations, and checked myself into my room. I'd picked the place not out of a desire to live large, but to present a cover if I needed one. The ride had given me plenty of time to think, and thinking had given me the frame for a plan.

Sex was for sale everywhere. It was just a question of knowing where to look. My first day in Trabzon, the day I met Arzu, I woke early, did yoga for half an hour, then ordered room service. The food arrived just after my shower, and I ate while going through Bakhar's address book, this time looking for numbers with a Trabzon exchange. There weren't any, which left me the BlackBerry, and while I was violently suspicious of the device, or, more precisely, of who might have Vladek's number and be tracking him through it, it gave me a window into his life and his business. All I needed to do was access the information.

The Zorlu had wireless, so I set up the laptop to download the software I needed, then went down to the lobby and got directions from the concierge to the nearest store selling mobile phones. It was a three-minute walk, but they didn't have the USB cable I needed. I bought two prepaid international SIM cards from them, anyway, then got directions to another store, which did carry replacement cables. I bought another two SIMs, and the cable, and headed back to the room. Then I ran the software I'd downloaded, plugged the BlackBerry into my USB port, and cracked open a very disturbing window into Vladek Karataev's life.

His address book, like Bakhar's, exercised discretion. While this time there were both first and last names to be discerned, there were no addresses provided, only phone numbers. It looked like Vladek had made a point of clearing out his emails and text messages regularly, and I was only able to find a handful of each. It would have been simple enough to recover the deleted communications, I suppose, but all the methods I knew of required additional hardware, none of which I had, and none of which I could think of a way to acquire quickly.

So I worked with what I did have, started searching, and the laptop made that easy; all I had to do was run a find. "Trabzon" didn't kick back any results. "Turkey" got the same negative result. When I tried the country code for Turkey, though, three hits came back, and one of those looked like it was for Trabzon, or at least close by-a man named Arzu Kaya. I checked against Bakhar's book, and lo and behold, he had an Arzu, too.

I skimmed the rest of the BlackBerry entries while considering how to proceed. There were numbers for phones in Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia, and it looked to me like Vladek had kept his business local, though I found two out of Western Europe-one in the Netherlands, the other in Germany.

The mail and text messages got my attention next. Almost all of the emails were in Cyrillic, which was a minor headache, as I could speak Russian much better than I could read it. It took me a while, even though they were universally terse. Vladek had been circumspect, carrying on what little correspondence remained in open code, with references to "deliveries" and "stock" and "items." It might've referred to anything, guns or drugs as much as people. It might've referred to Georgian wine.

Of the text messages, the most recent had been the one sent by Zviadi at the point of my gun. The only other sequence was a short exchange of messages sent the night Tiasa had been taken, between Vladek and Arzu. The exchange had run in Russian.

Which meant that Vladek had planned on selling Tiasa even before he and his pals had murdered Bakhar.

For a while, that was the worst the BlackBerry gave me.

Then I found the pictures.

And the video. The photos had been taken on the phone itself, and the most sinister thing about them was that they were so very mundane. Mostly headshots of different women, different girls, one after another. In a couple, the subject was actually smiling. In a couple, the subject was crying. If I'd seen them in any other place, had known they were taken by any other person than Vladek, it would have meant nothing.

But sitting at the desk in my hotel room at the Zorlu Grand Hotel, looking at them, I could only see them as the record they undoubtedly were. The women he had taken and trafficked, one after another, kept for posterity on his phone.

There were thirty-seven of them, and I made myself look at them all.

The last picture was of Tiasa. She looked at the camera with tears running down her face, snot leaking from her nose, clearly trying to stop crying.

Vladek had taken the picture after he'd raped her. I knew that, because he had the video of it, taken the same way he'd taken the photograph. Some dirty room in a dirty building with a mattress on the floor and four men taking turns with a fourteen-year-old girl who couldn't defend herself and had nowhere to run.

In Batumi, with a puncture in his femoral, Vladek had told me what he'd done to her, and I'd known he was telling the truth, but I had hoped he wasn't. I'd hoped he was throwing spite and hatred at me, trying to deliver wounds with the only weapon he'd had left. That's what I'd hoped.

I turned off the video before I saw more, but I'd already seen too much.

I should've known better than to hope. The day after I met Arzu, he called me at the hotel. It was twenty-two minutes past four in the afternoon.

"David," he said, "I think we're in business."

Nine There were three women in the room, and if you added all their ages together, you could probably break fifty years old.

Barely.

None of them was Tiasa. Two sat on a couch, at opposite ends from each other, strangers bound by common fear. The third one sat on a rickety chair in the opposite corner, almost in profile, watching me without turning her head. All of them wore clean, if worn and used, clothes, and all of them looked fed, and all of them looked bewildered and haunted by their circumstance.

"What do you think?" Arzu asked.

I forced my eyes to linger on the women, and in doing so absorbed more details. A broken fingernail. A bruise around one wrist. A clenched jaw. Finally, I looked at Arzu, and showed him a grin to demonstrate my pleasure. Then I put the grin away, so he could see that, too.

"They're all older than I was hoping," I told him.

He looked sincerely apologetic. "These are the youngest I could get. Give me another week or two, maybe I can find others."