Page 54 of Into the Gray Zone

We kept walking, stopping occasionally to check out a stall, until we were finally at the spice shop right next door to the target. I sampled the goods, with the crowd around me looking on expectantly. Jennifer stood next to me, acting interested, but really focused on the padlock about six feet away.

She leaned in and said, “I can pick it.”

I said, “Showtime.”

I thanked the proprietor and we continued on, reaching the front of the roll-up door. I purposely stepped on the heel of Jennifer’s Solomon shoe, pulling it off her foot. She stutter-stepped forward, then turned, bending down to put it back on her foot.

A woman holding a baby tugged my sleeve and I said, “Okay, okay, I give up.”

I pulled a wad of rupees out of my pocket and began handing them out, shooing away each person after I’d doled out their cash. I ended with a guy who was literally pushing himself along on a wooden trolley.

Jennifer stood back up, nodded at me, and we continued on, reaching an intersection with a major road. The beggar crowd kept following us, and I flagged down a rickshaw, getting in back and saying, “Just go around the block. Show us the bazaar.”

The driver nodded, and we were off, racing through the narrow alleys so fast that I had to duck my head from the pipes and electrical cables dangling about, Jennifer gasping every time someone jumped out of our way. We left the beggars behind, and I gripped the metal pole holding the awning over our head like it was a ripcord, grimacing with every pothole the driver powered through.

The guy weighed about a hundred and five, but he was pedaling like he was Lance Armstrong. We went through a linen section of the market, something that looked like a wedding dress area, then some sort of industrial space with sparks flying and blacksmiths banging away, the images appearing and disappearing so fast I wasn’t sure I’d seen them. Brett finally came on, saying, “This is Blood. I’m in.”

I leaned forward, tapped the driver, and said, “Back to the start.”

He nodded, and we continued through one claustrophobic alleyafter another, and I began to wonder if he was lost—because I most assuredly was at this point. Before I knew it, he’d re-entered the spice area above the location of Nadia’s family friend. I had no idea how, because we’d left much lower, but apparently he knew what he was doing.

I tapped him again and he stopped. I gave him a wad of rupees, much more than necessary, and dismounted quickly, before the beggars could home in on us like mosquitoes in a swamp.

We hurried the hundred meters to the target and entered without getting accosted anew. I turned and closed the roll-up door, then said, “Brett? You in here?”

“Yeah. Upstairs. Not a lot here.”

I flicked on an overhead light and threaded back to the rear of the narrow space, the walls lined with shelves, all empty, the air swirling with dust. At the very back, next to an abandoned crate full of empty soda bottles, I spied a bunch of new boxes on the ground. I picked one up and saw it was a box for a DJI Mavic 3 commercial drone, something that had been used in Ukraine to deliver death to the Russians with great effect.

Not good.

Jennifer had gone up the ladder to the top floor and said, “Pike, we have a computer up here.”

I went up and saw an Apple MacBook Pro on a simple table in an otherwise empty room. The only other items were four small mattresses and some blankets, with water bottles and soda cans scattered about.

No backpacks or other luggage. No personal items.

They aren’t coming back.

I turned to Brett and Jennifer around the computer, their faces lit up from the screen. “What do you have?”

Brett said, “Nothing yet. It’s password protected.”

“What’s on the back?”

Brett leaned over and said, “A MiFi internet connection.”

“We need that number.”

“You want to just pack it all up and go? It looks like they’re not coming back.”

“No. Someone’s coming for the computer. There will be a cleanup crew. Get an octopus on it. Drain it.”

Jennifer said, “That’ll take some time to crack the passwords. We could be here for hours.”

I said, “I know. Don’t worry about breaking it open right here. Just mirror the hard drive and clone the SIM card for the MiFi. We’ll crack the passwords later, when we have time.”

Brett reached into his backpack and pulled out a device with multiple cables coming out of it, looking like a small octopus. He plugged a USB C cable into the port on the side of the computer and hit a button. A light went green, then another, with five more to go.

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