Spy for Hire (24 page)

No, he thought. He had to be wrong. But he couldn’t block out the memory of the fighting from the night before. His mother in tears, accusing his father.

Opposite the staircase, on the other side of the living room, his father’s prized icons—Eastern Orthodox religious paintings—decorated the walls. Two-dimensional and stiff, they made Marko think of the Dark Ages. Jesus with his halo, John the Baptist holding a tri-bar cross… His father’s parents had brought the paintings with them when they had emigrated from Serbia. The paintings had been passed on to Marko’s father when they’d died.

The open door to the basement beckoned him. He took a step toward it. The light in the basement was on.

“Mom!”

The steps creaked as Marko descended them.

Laundry lines, sagging with the weight of wet clothes, crisscrossed the basement, and Marko detected the pleasant smell of detergent and bleach. Recognizing many of his own clothes, he wondered whether that had been intentional—whether she’d made a point of doing one last thing for him.

She’d hung the jury-rigged noose from a floor joist right in front of the staircase. The chair she’d stood on lay kicked to the side. Her bare feet dangled inches from the floor, her tongue was—

Marko turned away.

What she hadn’t intended was that he would be the one to find her. Of that he was certain. His father was supposed to have been the one to walk down these steps. On his lunch break.

He considered cutting her down and calling for an ambulance. Maybe she wasn’t really dead yet.

He forced himself to take another look. No, she was long past saving.

Unable to think, speak, or cry, he fell back onto the steps. All he wanted to do was run. But he couldn’t even force himself to do that. Eventually his thoughts turned to his brothers. And that’s when he understood what the blinking light on the answering machine was all about.

He stood, walked back up the stairs, and pushed play on the machine. As he expected, it was the secretary from the local preschool. No one had come to pick up his brothers. The boys were at the office, but the office would be closing soon. Someone needed to come get them.

Marko considered picking up his brothers himself. But would the school even release them to him? He was only seventeen, a brother not a parent… and if they did, where would he bring them? Not here, that much was certain.

He should call the cops.

No. His father could deal with that.

He felt for his wallet in his back pocket. It was still there. Inside was his brand-new driver’s license and twelve dollars. That would have to do.

The walk down to his father’s gas station on the corner only took a couple of minutes. It was a dismal place. The neon sign on the corner said
SAVE-A-LOT
,
only the
L
was dark. The pumps were all at least twenty years old. His dad still owed the previous owner lots of money, which meant money was tight in the Saveljic household. Too tight. That had been part of the problem.

As Marko approached, he saw that his father was cleaning the windshield of an orange Dodge Duster, behind the wheel of which sat an old biddy of a woman. A clock on top of one of the pumps read 3:44. Marko was supposed to have shown up for work four minutes ago. For years now, pumping gas at his father’s station had been his sole after-school activity.

“You’re late.” His father had broad shoulders, deep-set eyes, a hard jaw, and hair that was cut tight to his scalp. His voice was menacing and accusing. Tiny holes riddled his grease-stained work pants, a result of battery acid splatter.

“Why didn’t you go home for lunch today?” Marko asked.

Marko’s father finished cleaning the windshield and put his squeegee back into a bucket next to the gas pump. “How do you know I didn’t?”

“I just know.”

Marko’s father looked puzzled. “One of the pumps broke. Had to wait for a part from Romano’s. Why don’t you have your coveralls on? You show up late and you’re not even dressed for work?”

He positioned himself so that the old lady in the Duster couldn’t see him and gave Marko an unfriendly push on the shoulder.

He’d smothered her, thought Marko. He’d kept her in that dark cave of a home and had done little over the years but criticize the few friends she’d dared to make, criticize her hair, her weight, her mothering abilities, what he perceived to be her lack of faith…

Marko’s mother had come to the United States from Soviet Georgia when she was five. English had been her second language, and her timidity with the new tongue had spilled over into the rest of her life. His father had taken advantage of that timidity. He’d taken a gentle, kind, beautiful woman and turned her into a lost soul, starved for love.

And then he’d cheated on her. Marko had gleaned that much from their argument the night before. It seemed that his father had been having an affair with a woman from the Orthodox church, a young widow he’d supposedly been counseling.

“Mom’s waiting for you back at the house.”

“Eh?”

“She’s in the basement. She has something she wants to tell you.”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now.”

“Dammit, Marko! We’ve got work to do.”

“I’m quitting.”

A moment passed. Marko sensed a blow might be coming, but he just stared at his father, not backing down. Though they were about the same height, Marko didn’t yet possess his father’s strength.

“I don’t have time for this, Marko.”

“By the way, don’t forget about the boys. Someone needs to pick them up from school.”

“No one’s picked them up?”

“No. Mom can explain it. Like I said, she’s got something to tell you.”

Marko turned and began to walk away.

“Marko! Get back here! You gotta watch the pumps while I talk to your mom!”

Marko broke into a run. His father, he decided, was as dead to him as his mother was. From this day forward, as far as he was concerned, he was an orphan.

“Hey!”

Mark heard the voice, but was too absorbed in his thoughts at first to respond.

“Hey! Get up here. We’re leaving.”

Mark opened his eyes. He looked at the sun, and guessed it was around five in the afternoon, which would mean he’d been in the desert for four hours. He stood up slowly and stiffly, then walked back up the embankment to his abductors.

They returned to the main road they’d been on earlier and continued south. But they hadn’t been going long before they turned down a dirt road and pulled up to a little maintenance shack that sat near a cluster of oil pumps.

“Get out,” the driver ordered in English.

In case Mark hadn’t gotten the message, the older Saudi gestured to the door with his gun. Mark stepped out of the car.

44

Rad Saveljic was hungry, thirsty, panicked, lonely, lightheaded, and deeply depressed. On top of all that, his right leg was killing him. He couldn’t put any weight on it; hell, he couldn’t even touch it without flinching. It throbbed like a second heart down by his shinbone.

What had happened? And why had it happened to him? Where was he? How much time had passed? Was it about a ransom? Had someone contacted his boss, or his dad back in New Jersey, asking for money?

But these guys hadn’t said anything about money. They hadn’t said anything about anything. They’d just blindfolded him, stuffed him into a car, bundled him onto a plane, and then brought him to… Rad didn’t even know where he was.

Someone removed his blindfold.

He appeared to be in a shack of sorts. The floor was sandy and the air smelled of diesel fuel. It was hot. A few bags of dry concrete lay in a corner. He was seated on the floor, still wearing only his underpants and undershirt. From somewhere outside the shack, he could hear a rhythmic creaking, as though a baby were being rocked in a cradle. He wondered whether he was still in India.

Ten feet in front of him, a single guard, dressed in civilian clothes and armed with a large pistol, sat on a wooden packing crate. He didn’t look Indian.

Rad’s hands were cuffed behind his back with plastic ties that cut into his wrists. His stomach was still a hard knot, but at
least he no longer felt like vomiting; the pain in his leg had cured that. He asked the guard what was going on, and where he was, and for something to drink.

The guard ignored him.

Rad heard voices outside, then what sounded like men walking across gravel. He fixated on the nimbus of weak sunlight leaking in from around the perimeter of a metal door. Strange, he thought, that it was still daytime; it should have been past dark in Delhi by now. Maybe he’d lost track of the time, and hadn’t been traveling for as long as he’d thought. He heard footsteps outside. As the door handle rotated, and then the door opened, his stomach did a little flip.

Light spilled in. Squinting, the guard stood up and aimed his pistol at Rad’s head.

“Don’t!” Rad put his hands up to shield his head. “Please, don’t do it!”

Before Rad turned his eyes from the bright low sun, he caught a glimpse of a bleak desert landscape and a line of telephone poles that seemed to extend out into infinity.

The guard lowered his pistol, aimed it at Rad’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. The shot was so loud Rad felt as if he’d gone deaf. At least he didn’t really shoot me, Rad thought, confusing—for a brief moment—the pain in his shoulder, and the fact that he’d been thrown back against the wall, with a bad dream. This whole thing was a bad dream.

Damn, his shoulder hurt. The ringing in his ears subsided a bit, and he blinked his eyes. He could see now.

He
had
been shot. He was bleeding, and his chest was wet.
Oh God
, he thought.
Oh God
.

Rad couldn’t move his left hand, so he put his right hand up to his chest, thinking he’d try to stop the bleeding. It wasn’t his chest though, it was his shoulder. He squeezed where he thought he’d been shot and then screamed as the pain rocketed up into his brain.

A man of average height with unkempt hair appeared in the doorway to the shed. Rad couldn’t see the man’s face all that well because it was backlit by the sun.

“Who is this?” Rad heard the man say in English, in a voice that was hard and mean, but somehow strangely familiar. And then, “Why did you shoot him?”

Someone shoved the man into the shed. Then the door slammed closed.

Rad tried to see through the darkness but by now his eyes had partially adjusted to the bright light outside so he still couldn’t see the man’s features.

“I’ve been shot,” said Rad.

“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”

“Who are you?”

The man didn’t answer. Instead, he quickly knelt down. His hand darted out, snakelike, toward Rad’s shoulder.

Rad screamed in pain again, and tried to pull back, thinking that maybe this guy had been sent into the shed to torture him.

“Listen,” said the man, “I’m going to try to help you, but I need you to calm the fuck down.”

45