The Blood Price

13. Back Doors

With the gate to my back, ours was the fourth house to the right. To the left, past the houses on that side, the ground fell steeply towards Vlore. To the right it sloped gently upwards into untamed land thick with bushes and clumps of trees. For the first time I understood the terrible appeal of land mines. At that moment I would have liked nothing more than the knowledge that the land around Sinisa's compound was sown with lethal and undetectable explosives. But it wasn't, or he would have warned us when we first arrived.

I wasn't tired. I wanted to go for a walk, but of course I had just been told not to leave the compound for any reason whatsoever. I wanted a cigarette, but Arwin was already asleep. I walked to our house, intending to try to sleep, but at the last second I changed my mind and went around the house, walked through our backyard of thigh-high weeds and into the forest.

I was violating Sinisa's direct order, and technically endangering myself, but that didn't really concern me. If the Tigers were waiting in the forest right behind our house then Saskia and I were pretty screwed anyhow. Leaves and branches clawed at my face and I pushed them aside. Once I was past the first screen of trees the forest was very dark. I began to wonder what the hell I was doing and why I hadn't stopped in my room to pick up my Maglite.

Then I stepped on something hard. I knelt and felt around, ran my hands over a cracked dome of concrete. Of course. A bunker, one of Hoxha's omnipresent mushrooms. Good enough, I decided. What I wanted was a quiet contemplative place to sit and think. This would do. I sat down at the apex of the bunker's six-foot-diameter dome, and I began to ponder.

I couldn't shake the image of Sinisa's callous execution of the Afghani man on the boat. Maybe he had been dying, but we could have taken him to the hospital or called a doctor, we could at least have tried to save him. The idea had not even crossed Sinisa's mind. So much for Robin Hood.

I shouldn't have been surprised. The man had a private army, he invited snipers to his business meetings, his closest assistants were Zoltan and Zorana, not exactly Central Casting's answer to Friar Tuck and Maid Marian. And yet I had somehow let him convince me with a few honeyed words that he was on the side of the angels.

They call it the Stockholm Syndrome, when hostages begin to support and identify with the hostagetakers. When someone controls your life and the hour of your death, you desperately want to believe that they are good and noble. And Saskia and I had fallen completely into Sinisa's power the moment we crossed the border into Albania.

Sinisa didn't want to be Robin Hood. He had told me so himself. He wanted to be a CEO like Jeff Bezos or Gordon Moore. Maybe Pablo Escobar was a better analogy, cocaine emperor of the eighties, multibillionaire smuggler, at one point the eleventh wealthiest man in the world. Escobar had been assassinated, hunted down by American soldiers using advanced electronic surveillance techniques. I suspected Sinisa knew all about the killing of Pablo Escobar. I suspected his investment in Mycroft had something to do with that history lesson.

Illegal immigration wasn't exactly cocaine smuggling, but it was big business. I had read a lot about it in the last few weeks. At least ten billion dollars a year, estimated The Economist, spent in every corner of the globe. Mexican "coyotes", who escort hundreds of thousands of the undocumented over the US border every year, some of whom begin their journeys in Bolivia or Paraguay. Chinese "snakeheads," who fill shipping containers with people and send them from Shanghai to Long Beach, or buy old freighters, pack them to the gills with people, and sail them across the Pacific. Balkan gangs like Sinisa's who conduct their clients-slash-victims, Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, Kurdish, Arabian, Turkish, name your nationality, into Western Europe. Moroccans who cross the Straits of Gibraltar in rowboats overcrowded with Africans who might have come all the way from the Congo. Other Africans go south, hitch or jump trains or just walk, sometimes thousands of kilometres, all the way from their homes to Johannesburg or Cape Town. Haitians and Cubans take insane risks to come to Florida on rafts made of inner tubes. Indonesians come to Australia on stolen ships sold to them by the pirates who still ply the Straits of Malacca.