Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Hoisting Davila into the van was a nightmare. The guy had half a foot on him and about fifty pounds in hard muscle. One thing DCC had drummed into all of them was basic rescue skills, like the fireman’s carry, which he managed after a lot of huffing and puffing. The hard part was letting Davila, who was only so much dead weight, down gently. In the end, he fashioned a kind of pillow from a couple of plastic tarps then staggered over to the open slider, backed up until he felt the running board against his thighs. Bending at the knees, he lowered Davila onto the tarps where he sprawled in an ungainly tangle. After rearranging Davila’s limbs and quickly checking the man’s breathing and pulse, he piled on sleeping bags to keep Davila warm.

Got to get us somewhere safe. He thought he knew where to go, but he would have to be fast. He sniffed the air, caught that hint of aluminum, glanced up again at a clot of leaden clouds. Snow, definitely on the way.

First things first. He patted the kid down, turned the kid’s pockets inside out, shook out the boy’s shoes, went through the child’s puffy black parka. He didn’t know why he thought that was a good idea. Of course, with a wounded partner and nearly ending up déjà dead himself...his trust in others was thin.

The boy’s apparel was ordinary except for a leather cord around the child’s neck. Interesting. By and large, Muslim men were not permitted to wear anything considered to be women’s wear. The only exceptions John knew about were for protective amulets containing verses from the Qur’an. Of course, given what he suspected Matvey was , perhaps a necklace of sorts would be part of the costume. Curious, he fished out the cord.

“What is this?” A thin, black-enameled cylinder with bronze accents dangled from the end of the cord. He bounced the cylinder on a palm. Got some weight to it. About six inches long, the cylinder reminded John of old-time pictures of items that might have hung from a woman’s fancy chatelaine: small pencils, eyeglasses, keys, scissors, thimbles. This was, however, much longer than anything he’d ever seen on a chatelaine.

He switched to his halting pig-Russian. “Cho?” he asked again. “What is this? Cho eto, Matvey? ”

The boy said nothing. His dark brown eyes were void of expression .

Which, in and of itself, told him something about this thing was wrong. Might just be stolen. But then why clam up? Wasn’t as if the kid had taken this from him , and John certainly wasn’t in any position to report the kid.

Tracing the cylinder’s edges with a forefinger, he felt just the slightest hint of a bump at one end. Hunh . There was no corresponding bump at the other end. “Cho ... ” But then he couldn’t remember the words and switched to English. “What does this do?”

No answer.

Something wasn’t right here. If I didn’t know better... He applied a slight pressure with a thumb to the bump. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this is a toggle or a ? —

“Whoa,” he said, as a thin stiletto blade jumped from its holder and snapped into place. “What the...” He looked at the kid then back at the steel blade: all six inches of it. The thing even had a thin blood groove running from the tip to the metal blade catch. “An OTF? For what?”

Of course, the kid wasn’t going to answer, but John could take a wild guess as to why the child had an out-the-front spring action knife. Like the more well-known balisongs, or butterfly knives, which looked cool in movies, OTF knives and switchblades, both of which were spring action, had only one purpose: to slice and dice and gut a guy. He was pretty sure that, in some countries, you couldn’t even own one .

And yet... He spotted a tiny clump of what looked like compacted dirt in the blood groove that the blade’s out-the-front spring action had jogged loose. Scraping a bit of the grit onto a fingernail, he gave the crumbs a sniff. A scent reminiscent of a rusty red wagon left out in the rain filled his nostrils.

Ohhh-kay then. No way of telling how old, but that was definitely dried blood. Which meant that the blade had seen some action. Considering why Matvey’s owner might loan the child out, none of that action could be good.

Or that might have been part of the con. Get a guy who can afford to buy you into a position where he can’t fight back or resist then pull the knife, rob the guy, and book. No Afghan man in his right mind would report something like that. Seriously, what could the guy say? Yeah, see, there was this boy, and I bought him for a little…well, you know, a fella has needs…

“If it’s all the same to you, Matvey,” he said as he slid the knife into a pocket, “I’ll just hang onto this for the time being.” Like, forever.

Sitting the child down on a rock, he searched the dead guys next, starting with Matvey’s owner. Trying to roll the guy was like trying to budge a walrus, but he finally managed to tug off the man’s thick parka. He wasn’t a ghoul, but the extra jacket would come in handy. There was nothing in the parka other than a handful of bullets, but he found cash and a folding knife in a trouser pocket. From another, he fished a Soviet-made handgun, a set of amber worry beads, and a ring of keys. He left the cash and worry beads and was about to stuff the keys back into the guy’s pocket…only to pause. One key had a logo stamp that looked familiar, but he wasn’t sure, and there was no time to compare. In the end, he pocketed the keys, the folder, the handgun, and all the bullets and slung the rifle’s carry-strap over a shoulder.

The younger man was still flat on his back but not blowing air bubbles anymore, mostly because he was dead. John wished he felt bad, but he didn’t. Instead, he went through the same ritual: stripping off the parka, going through the man’s pockets. He found bullets but no keys or money, and no other weapon except a folder, which he took along with the ammo and rifle.

Back to the van: he checked on Davila and was relieved to see he was still breathing then heaped on the men’s parkas. Job one was to keep Davila warm and alive until John got them both someplace safe where he could tend to the man’s injuries.

He left Parviz for last. He didn’t know why. Maybe because the driver wasn’t just some anonymous bandit. The guy had played bad Tajik rock, for God’s sake. He kept remembering what Parviz had said about there being no work, no money. Maybe, in another life, that was an excuse for robbing people. Worked out okay for Robin Hood. (Even if he ended up a broken-down alcoholic, Errol Flynn had been just terrific.) He could’ve forgiven Parviz for wanting the money .

But not for being willing to kill us.

Parviz’s lids were at half-mast, the corneas already beginning to grow milky. The driver wasn’t wearing his parka, only a fur-lined vest that John peeled from the body. Parviz had left his keys in the ignition and had no knife, but he did have a thin wallet. To John’s immense relief, there was no movie-moment where he pulled out a crinkled photograph and so got a glimpse of Parviz, the man. All he found were three driver’s licenses: one that he thought was Tajik, and another in an Arabic-style script that Parviz had probably used in Afghanistan.

The third was Russian. Cyrillic characters in bold, English in regular font. Roman numerals. The photo was of a much-younger Parviz. No stubble, a thinner moustache. His face was a little rounder, more meat on the bone. He had no way of knowing if the license was genuine or something Parviz had gotten on the black market. But if Parviz was into the people-smuggling business, it paid to have an up-to-date license. According to this, Parviz’s license was good for another eight years.

He pocketed them all. Didn’t know why. Couldn’t begin to imagine how they might come in handy, only that they might.

Then he helped the kid into the passenger seat, snicked on the kid’s shoulder harness, started up the engine with the keys Parviz had left in the ignition, and got the hell out of there.