Eagle's Heart (2 page)

Julian ran a finger over the picture's frayed edge, and then said, “How long are you going to stand there, Yates? It’s kind of creepy.”

Miranda Yates, the agent he was sharing the office with—or rather whose office he was intruding upon for the duration of his assignment—moved from behind him to sit at the desk facing his.

“Eyes in the back of your head, huh?” she asked, handing him a small cup of coffee as she moved past him.

“No, but I can sense a woman’s gaze from fifty paces,” he drawled in his deep, lyrically accented voice.

She rolled her eyes and dropped into her seat.

“Coffee’s from the Turkish place down the street, so you should like it,” she said as she removed the jacket of her slim-tailored suit and placed it on the back of her seat. She was tall, almost as tall as him, with long blonde hair she wore in a mussed ponytail that belied her general anal retentiveness.

“Considering your line of work, I should probably break it to you gently that Turkey and Albania are, in fact, two different countries,” he said as he took a sip. “But this is very good, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, smart-ass. I thought you’d need it since you’ve been combing through these files with no rest,” she said and then ventured on, glancing at the picture. “I checked that out when you first got here. You were a pretty cute kid, even if your clothes were weird.”

Julian noticed her gaze slip from the picture to his hand, following the path of raised scar tissue that stretched up his forearm and under his sleeve.

“Glad to see we respect each other’s privacy around here,” Julian said, despite the fact he had already looked over Yates’s desk in addition to doing a background check on her, her sister, and her sister’s husband. He had passed on running one on her twin niece and nephew, as they were toddlers.

But the photo was more than background information: it was a totem, and something he didn’t share with others. The conjecture in her eyes when she’d looked from the picture to his arm had elicited a reaction that he usually prided himself on being able to suppress.

“Darling, we work for the FBI,” she said shortly. “Invasion of Privacy is my middle name, and it better be yours too, while you’re assigned to this task force.”

She took a sip of her coffee and booted up her computer.

Julian regretted being brusque with her. Although his charm was supposed to be one of his main assets, he wasn’t used to working with others for long periods of time. His job had begun in the translations department, the Arabic division, before he had made an unprecedented position change and eventually landed the case that had driven him toward the law in the first place—trying to take down Bardhyn Murzaku.

“The clothes are traditional Albanian peasant clothing,” Julian said, trying to reel Yates back in. “The hat is called a
qeleshe
; the vest is called a
xhaqete
.”

“A jacket?” she asked archly. “How thoroughly exotic. Never heard of such a thing.”

“Xhaqete. It’s a cognate…” he began and realized he was dipping into language-nerd territory. “Anyway, we were dressed up for a folk-dancing recital.”

“You should try that outfit out here in New York. I’m sure you could pull some Albanian chicks and then milk them for info. Bat those pretty lashes at them, and let them touch your qeleshe, and they’d be putty in your hands.”

Julian grinned.

“From what I’ve seen, the look du jour for Albanian kids these days is gold chains and T-shirts down to their knees, so I think I’d stand out a bit in that outfit.”

“Well, those are the aspiring rappers. The gangsters favor tracksuits, for the most part, with the exception of Birdie’s crew. They’re always dressed up like they’re going to the Cotton Club. Gentleman gangsters, if you will.”

At the mention of Bardhyn’s nickname, Julian realized he still held the picture in his hand. He placed it facedown, drained the coffee in one long gulp, and started shuffling through papers again.

“If there’s one thing I can say about Birdie, it’s that he’s consistent. He was always an elegant dresser, even when most people in our country couldn’t afford to eat.”

“Was he also always a sociopath?” Yates asked, and Julian knew what she was really asking. He asked himself the same thing every day.

Did you always know what he was? Did you do anything to stop him?

Julian shrugged.

“Maybe so. We were young, and he was my friend,” Julian said. “I thought he was so clever and cool that his quick temper just seemed like quirk.”

“Until?” she prodded.

“Until he got a little taste of power. I’m sure it’s in your records, but when we were teens, we started a gang. ”

“And now you’re a spook. Were you scared straight?” Yates asked, eyeing him curiously.

“Something like that. I wasn’t what you call a good kid, but I knew the difference between right and wrong,” Julian said smoothly, ignoring Yates’s probing look. If she wanted to know his secrets, she could do her job and investigate him. “Birdie only knew what made him feel good, and if he didn’t get caught—and he never did—why should conventional matters of morality bother him? He only had one code of honor: the
Besa
.”

Yates picked up the well-worn copy of the
Kanun
Julian had spotted on her desk. It was basically the guide to Albanian culture, discussing the four pillars: hospitality, good conduct, honor, and kin loyalty. The latter two were what the gangs used to their advantage.

“The Besa, aka, the bane of my existence, aka, the reason we can never get an Albanian to snitch,” Yates said, dropping the book and starting to type. “Why does it still hold such sway with people? Isn’t all that tribal shit in the past?”

The past is never the past, Julian thought, but then paused before answering. He had given much thought to the topic over the years, especially in the aftermath of the dark memories that plagued his sleep, when fire bit at his hands and smoke filled his lungs, and he had to tell himself that it had only been another nightmare.

“The way I think of it, and this is just my opinion, is that when a person is poor, the only thing they can control is their honor,” he said. “Think about in this country. Where are you most likely to hear about someone getting killed over some innocuous slight, real or imagined? A housing project or a trailer park or a rundown town in the middle of nowhere.

“After years of isolation, war, genocide, pyramid schemes, and government corruption, the Besa is the only thing that seems real to some Albanian people. It’s a code that’s survived thousands of years.”

Yates looked at him, gave a thoughtful nod.

“I grew up in a mining town in Appalachia,” she said. “I know how much honor costs when there’s no money to back it up. But give me some more stuff about Bardhyn when he was young. We mostly have information on his adult activities: gunrunning, murder, human trafficking… Crazy that the thing that finally put him on our radar was forging passports, isn’t it?”

“The government has to have priorities,” Julian said, stretching. His back ached from hunching over the desk for so long.

“So you were telling me about this gang,” she said, not bothering to hide the judgment in her voice.

“We were kids. A gang seemed like a good distraction from the fact that the government was collapsing and people in other countries thought our kind should be wiped from the face of the earth. Trust me, I paid for my dalliance with the bad boys.”

Yates stopped typing, and he could tell she was avoiding looking at his scars.

“Sorry,” she said.

Julian ignored her and continued.

“I was good with words, and the other boys liked having me around to tell them what to do. We didn’t really do much but play bootleg video games and get into schoolyard fights until I brought Birdie in. It was fun at first, having him there, but as time went on, he wanted to steal more, hurt people worse, use weapons. But things were different then, and I thought of him as my brother.”

“So you were that close with him?” Yates asked.

“Too close to realize how dangerous he was until it was too late,” Julian said. He started scanning through transcript files.

“Is that why you’re doing this? Out of guilt?”

“I joined the FBI because I had an aptitude for languages and a desire to help people,” Julian said. “I was lucky enough to get to this country and have complete strangers believe in me. If I can help stop a terrorist or a drug dealer, it’s the least I can do.”

He paused.

“But catching Birdie would make everything else worthwhile,” he finished quietly.

He could feel Yates’s eyes on him, but he kept thumbing through the transcripts. Someone had gotten a phone tap on the girlfriend of one Birdie’s low-level thugs, a Russian who had scurried over to the Albanians when they became one the most powerful gangs in town. He skimmed the Cyrillic transcriptions, mostly the boring dramas of daily life, until a snippet of conversation from the newest batch of intel caught his eye.

“So is your boss is going to handle this or what, Alexi? I don’t want child services breathing down my neck again. It’s your fault the teacher got so mad.”

“I told that bitch not to go to the cops! Luckily, she went to a precinct right in his territory. Those pigs are under his thumb, they’re not gonna touch him. But her, she’s got something coming. I told Birdie that she—”

“She’s gonna get fired, right? I told Yelena she’d better say whatever I told her to when we went to the principal or I’d beat like she never got it before.”

“Fired? Do you even listen to the shit I tell you about this guy? He’s gonna make her wish she was never born.”

“Why not just kill her?”

“What’s the fun in that? Check the newspapers this week. This Jones bitch thinks she can threaten me? She fucked with the wrong guy.”

“Yeah, your boss. Too bad you couldn’t take care of her yourself, you pussy.”

“I'll take care of you next time I see you, bitch.”

“Ah, young love,” Julian said as he grabbed a pen and circled the conversation in red ink. It had to be something. That little thrumming motion in his stomach, his gut instinct, was on high alert.

He searched for the date of the transcript and then flung the pages over his desk at Yates.

“Read that,” he said as he pulled up a search engine on his Web browser and his fingers tapped out the relevant keywords.

“Blah, blah blah blah, blah,” she said in an annoyed tone before tossing the papers aside. “It’s in Russian, Mr. Multilingual Showoff.”

“Okay, forget that and come over here.” He beckoned her. “It’s a conversation between one of Birdie’s social climbers, Alexi Turginov, and one of his girlfriends. She’s asking him if his boss is going to take care of some teacher who threatened to call child services on them. Et voila.”

Julian pointed at the screen with a flourish, his delight at having easily found the teacher mixed with horror at what he had pulled up. An image of a woman trying to shield her face from tabloid reporters as she exited a police station was plastered on the front page of a local newspaper. She was dark-skinned and fine-featured and obviously terrified. Julian knew the look in her eyes well. Fear and disbelief and dead-eyed horror.

“Teacher Hot for Students,” Yates read the bold headline and then the bullet points, her tone dripping with disgust. “Local teacher embroiled in teen sex scandal. Teacher was involved with multiple organizations that gave her access to young, underprivileged girls.”

“Jesus,” Julian said. “How much do you want to bet that there’s no real evidence to support any of these claims?”

Unable to look at the large brown eyes brimming with tears for a moment longer, he clicked away to another image. In this picture, probably taken from a social networking site, she was wearing nothing but a very small bikini and a broad smile as she sipped from a giant daiquiri on a pristine beach.

“Why? Because she’s hot?” Yates asked, eyeing the photo appreciatively.

“No, because if you read the transcript, he says Bardhyn is going to ruin a teacher named Jones’s life. Being accused of being a child molester seems like a definite life destroyer. Plus, I can just…tell.” His instinct thrummed in agreement. He clicked back in the browser and enlarged the initial picture. “Come on. Does that look like the picture of a perp, or like someone who’s caught in a nightmare?”

“Maybe you’re right. If she’s innocent, then that means she might know something. But if she knows something, why wouldn’t he just kill her?” Yates asked, unconsciously echoing the transcript.

“Because Birdie is a sadistic fuck. He doesn’t think like you or me. He likes killing people, but more than that, he likes hurting them. He enjoys destroying their very essence. What little can you glean about this woman from this front page?”

“She’s a teacher who also volunteered with underprivileged kids,” Yates said.

“And she got Birdie’s attention because she tried to stop people who were abusing a kid,” Julian added. “So he hit her where it hurts. She’ll never be able to teach again. She’ll never be able to volunteer again. Anytime someone searches for her name—and Salomeh Jones is a very unique name—this is what will come up. It doesn’t even have to be true.”

“He’s a thorough bastard,” Yates said, flopping down in her seat. “This is sad and all, but the more important thing here is taking this guy down. What does she know? Do you think it'll be valuable to us?”

“Only one way to find out,” Julian said, wondering if this Salomeh Jones knew just how much trouble she had gotten herself into.

Chapter Two

“Salomeh? Come on,
guapa
, enough of this already.”

Marta’s voice was muffled from outside the heavy quilt, beneath which Salomeh lay motionless, pretending not to hear her best friend. Maybe if she didn’t move, Marta wouldn’t find her. It had worked in
Jurassic Park
. It could work for her.

“Salomeh?”

Marta was closer now. Apparently she wasn’t as easily fooled as a giant reptile with a brain the size of a walnut.

Salomeh sighed and unfurled from the fetal position, preparing to leave the relative safety she had found beneath her sheets. She had been holed up in her apartment for days. Even the familiar tree-lined streets of her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood had become too fraught with danger to navigate. It wasn’t only the fear of reporters waiting to pounce or strangers ready to judge her, but also the knowledge that Alexi and his boss could decide to hurt her, broken-kneecaps hurt her, at any time.