CHAPTER 8
Brenna sat on the floor of her living space, the second of her two travel bags pinched between her knees, stuffing cartons of Marlboros into the center compartment.
She herself didn’t smoke, but in Kav?ak, cigarettes were as good as money.
Everyone there smoked—it was the national vice.
With the shortages brought on by the siege, people rolled whatever poor-quality tobacco they could obtain into any paper they could find, often using the pages of reference books or dictionaries for the purpose.
Smoking was educational, they joked. You could learn about the manufacture of metals or European history while you indulged.
Smoking was so entrenched, the locals said, if cigarettes became unavailable, the city would surrender.
Although a local tobacco company continued to manufacture cigarettes despite the siege, their quality didn’t match the American-made product, so the cartons she was packing would grease a maximum number of palms.
Next, she slid dozens of colorful packets of vegetable seeds—tomatoes, lettuce, beans—into the bag beside the cartons.
The average Kav?ak lost two pounds every week.
During the first winter of the siege, Kav?aks’ pre-war overweight protected them from illness, but as the siege dragged on, the populace became progressively more emaciated.
Key dietary deficiencies like Vitamin C, B6, B12, and folate—essential for tissue repair—became so widespread that hospitals saw massive increases in wound infection rates.
Easily treatable diseases like diarrhea, dehydration, pneumonia, and ear infections increasingly claimed the lives of infants and the elderly, as they became exhausted by malnutrition and the cold.
As a result, Kav?aks cultivated every patch of bare ground they could find that wasn’t already planted with land mines.
Gardens supplemented the edible weeds and meager U.
N. rations that kept the locals marginally fed, often making the difference between starvation and survival.
She cushioned a fresh vial of highly-concentrated morphine, circled with bubble wrap, a few low-dose syringes, and cards of oral antibiotics into her kit between the cigarette cartons.
Her brother James, a doctor, had prescribed them for her.
They were temporary insurance against injury, and the infection that inevitably accompanied it.
“It’s dangerous to take drugs like this without a doctor’s supervision,” he had said, when she first requested the meds.
“And it’s even worse to have your flesh hanging off in strips with nothing for pain,” she retorted. In the hospitals, surgeons carved living flesh without benefit of anesthetics. Wounded patients screamed into their pillows for days. People on this side simply didn’t understand.
Once she got to Italy, she would transfer the morphine and syringes into the secret lining of her custom-made leather jacket.
More valuable at some destinations than any currency she could possibly carry, she had only once relinquished her medical supplies—to buy herself out of occupied territory after so-called safe zone lines had shifted behind her.
When she finished with the bags, she would stuff the stacks of low-denomination US dollars and Euros that she used for bribery into separate, hidden pockets in her jacket and cargo pants. The airport screeners would see them, but nothing said she couldn’t carry money.
She slid the zipper around the perimeter of the bag and scooted it toward the front door beside its mate.
Every inch of every pocket in her travel bags was packed according to an established pattern, with contents always in the same place so she could reach them without looking.
Personal comforts were sacrificed for professional gear, which had been modified to its smallest, hardiest, form.
The bags would never leave her possession.
Nothing would be checked, nothing left to chance.
Everything was accounted for except the random nature of brutality.
Her video camera awaited her at the Kav?ak airport with a trusted friend. Once she got it back she’d never put it down. It was as essential to her as a rifle was to a front-line soldier.
She stood up and stretched out the kinks in her shoulders.
During the past three days, she had begun to move like an athlete toward the main event.
She ate protein, as much as she could stand, and carbohydrates.
She ran as much as she could, meticulously replacing her electrolytes each time.
She would not embark at a physical deficit.
She was heading into a week of stress and uncertainty.
Enervating days of travel would be followed by three days when she might feast or famine, drink or be parched, freeze or roast.
She would be constantly on the move. Sleep would be intermittent and disturbing, if she got any at all.
She might live or die.
Balancing herself against a shelf as she rose, her fingers brushed the old Olympus SLR camera sitting atop it.
It was the camera that her mother had given her, a simple model without bells or whistles.
All you needed was a good eye and impeccable timing.
With a fingertip, she traced the dent on the rim of the lens.
This old camera took her Pulitzer Prize winner.
After she’d cleaned the blood off it, she’d never used it again.
Shaking herself from her abstraction, she looked for the next task.
The house was easy. There were no plants to water.
No pets to board. No newspapers to cancel.
No food in the fridge. Even the cupboards were bare.
At a time when most kids were learning to cook, Brenna’s mother lay dying of cancer.
The kitchen was a mystery to Brenna, food something bought ready-to-eat.
When she left, she would slip the house key into the rosemary bush and be gone.
She lived a life designed for departure.