CHAPTER 21
Pazi, Snajper! RUN or R.I.P.!
Grace glimpsed the red-lettered warning sign through the APC’s peephole as the vehicle crossed the deserted parking lot surrounding the Holiday Inn.
Looking upwards into the falling rain, she saw that the top floors of the hotel were gutted, their windows gone and the yellow building paint scorched by fire.
Down on the ground, stacked sandbags formed a defensive wall.
The APC tilted down the ramp into the underground parking lot. Grace’s view went dark.
The vehicle took a turn and rolled to a stop. “Good. We’re here,” Brenna said.
Finally, Grace thought. Now they would connect with Geoff Garrett and get the shoot organized.
The soldiers, who would continue on to their postings, opened the hatch doors to let them out.
Brenna lifted her bags and the camera. Stepping over their gear, she edged past the hulking men. A camping lantern swung into view, held aloft by a bony-cheeked young woman wearing an oversized green blazer.
“Welcome back, Miss Rease.”
“Thank you, Natka.” Brenna hitched her pack onto her shoulder.
Grace followed her out.
“Welcome, ma’am. No bags?”
She shook her head.
“This way,” the greeter said, extending her arm as graciously as if she were guiding them through a polished brass portal. She led them up the service stairs, lantern held high. At the landing, Brenna extracted a cranberry granola bar from the inside pocket of her jacket and slipped it to Natka.
“Thank you.” Natka tucked the bar into her pants pocket as if it were an ordinary tip. “My daughter will love the treat.” Stepping aside, she opened the door to the deeply-shadowed hotel lobby and let them pass.
Grace stepped into the din of the cavernous room and stopped in incredulity.
With the plate glass of the south entrance boarded over, and no electricity, the space was cave-dark, with only pools of gloomy light illuminating it.
The perimeter walls were sectioned into makeshift stalls made of heavy plastic sheeting tacked onto reclaimed lumber.
Hand-made signs duct-taped to the huts proclaimed them to be news bureaus: ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, Agence France Presse, and other international agencies.
It looked like a refugee camp for journalists.
Inside the cubicles, she saw monitors, stacked video-editing decks, audio-recorders, external data recorders, and data-transmission units.
Thick black electrical cables snaked out along the walls, presumably toward dedicated generators.
At a nearby booth, an unkempt-looking group of men and women were clustered around a large monitor, intently watching the CNN news feed.
With a jolt, she realized the footage was familiar. A high angle of the Kav?ak market square. General Goran ?avi? standing in his jeep, signaling the start of his gruesome massacre. Shock ran through her, followed by a wave of nausea. Brenna’s footage was on the air.
A deafening explosion shook the hotel.
Grace ducked instinctively, shielding her eyes from the grit floating down from the ceiling.
Calm as suburbanites who stop talking while noisy airplanes pass overhead, the seasoned journalists waited for the reverberations to stop, then casually resumed where they had left off until a familiar-looking correspondent glimpsed Brenna.
“Yo! Brenna!” he called from the cluster of CNN-watchers. “Way to kick ?avi?’s butt!” The others dragged their eyes off the screen and saw her. Hooting in cheerful support, they began applauding, shouting out: “WooHoo! Go you good thing! Victory la-ap!”
Acknowledging their raucous acclaim, Brenna waved like the Queen, and moved on, searching the lobby.
“Brenna!”
She stopped, pinpointing the source of that one particular voice.
Grace saw her lock eyes with those of a swarthy man with the side of his face covered by burn scars. She tapped her watch, held up five splayed fingers, and pointed upwards, her index finger bobbing. The man nodded and vanished.
“Let’s get Garrett’s room number,” Grace said, turning in the direction of the reception desk.
“No.” She held her back with a hand on her forearm. “He’ll be at the bar.”
Poom. Poom-poom. Three more shells landed in quick succession, their noise drowning out the din of the lobby. Grace startled, dodging reflexively.
“There,” Brenna said. “I see him.”
Up three steps on a central raised platform, a circular bar dominated the lobby like an altar.
Surrounded by cocktail tables, the bar was ground zero for the hotel.
Low-wattage light bulbs strung across improvised posts were connected by jumper cables to a series of car batteries set at intervals along the counter.
Green-jacketed, bow-tied wait staff deftly maneuvered food and drink trays through the crowded maze, unflappable hoteliers setting orders before grungy patrons wearing hard hats and miners’ lights.
The Holiday Inn, with its incongruously Christmassy-sounding name, was the only operating hotel in the city, a testament to the people who kept it running.
Grace followed her as she threaded her way among the tables, through a gauntlet of congratulations from the journalists with whom she shared the surreal life of a war correspondent.
Brenna stopped in front of a rail-thin, greasy-haired drunk with a stringy beard, who was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that had yellow armpits. His jeans were so filthy they could have stood up by themselves. “Garrett,” she said, as though she were spitting something foul off her tongue.
Grace’s jaw dropped in disbelief. This wasn’t Geoff Garrett. Brenna was mistaken. This man was dissolute, a lush, not the man she knew at Columbia.
Garrett saluted Grace with his whisky glass. “Son of a bitch—you made it!” Holding his drink out to the side so it wouldn’t spill, Garrett eased off the barstool, draped his free arm over Grace’s shoulder and squeezed her with genuine affection.
Grace recoiled from his fetid breath. “Geoff?”
“Sit. Sit. Have a drink.” He signaled the bartender.
Grace caught his hand. “Geoff. It’s nine-thirty in the morning.”
“Yeah,” he grinned. “Late start.”
“EBS must have given you a cash advance,” Brenna said, eyeing Garrett’s near-empty highball glass. “You’ve traded up from your usual rotgut.”
“You’re talking, Miss Goody Two-Shoes? Didn’t I see you slip off your pedestal just before you skipped town? You were sitting right there with the rest of the rabble, sucking down booze well before the cocktail hour. We all fall into the abyss, Mighty Dyke, and your turn’s coming.”
Brenna scowled, displeased with the nickname.
Across the crowded seating area, Grace saw two men dropping bills on a dish-cluttered table. She tapped Geoff on the shoulder and pointed. “There. Go get that table. We need to feed you.”
Geoff glugged the last of his booze, thunked the glass on the bar and shambled past her. The back of his shirt was crudely painted with crosshairs and the words: “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.”
Grace studied Brenna. She wasn’t surprised to see Geoff in this condition. She’d just looked on as they’d traveled halfway around the world to hang Aya’s project on a drunkard’s shoulders. “You knew,” she shot at her. “You knew back in Washington and you didn’t say a thing.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “I tried to. And you ignored me.”
“You could have insisted.”
“Oh? And just when did you expect this collegial exchange to occur, Alcott? Between which of your interminable contracts?”
Grace raked her hair with frustration at herself. She’d been so busy locking Brenna down contractually, she hadn’t offered her the chance to contribute. She dropped her hand. “You know what? You’re right. I was an idiot.”
“An asshole, more like.”
Grace blinked. “That’s an unladylike expression.”
“If you wanted Miss Manners you should have hired her.”
“Very well,” she relented. “I apologize. I was an asshole.”
“Did you pay Garrett already?” Brenna asked.
“A retainer.”
“Write it off.”
“I’ll sober him up.”
“Look,” she said, “Whoever he was when you knew him? He doesn’t exist anymore. He doesn’t own his life.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s melting his EBS money in a spoon and shooting it up his veins.”
“No. Not Geoff. Can’t be. What drugs?”
“Heroin, I would think.”
“Surely, you’re mistaken.”
Brenna hitched her bag up her shoulder. “It’s easy enough to roll up his sleeves and see for yourself, isn’t it?”
“Where are you going?”
“I have work to do while you feed your stray. I’ll be back in half an hour and we can head out.”
“Wait! Head out where? We haven’t made a plan.”
“What’s to discuss? You know zip about Kav?ak and I have everything set up.” She turned away.
Grace caught her elbow. “Don’t treat me like I’m some bumbling tag-along.” She hated chaos. Her body hurt. And her grad-school friend, apparently, was a drug addict. Everything about this trip was out of control. Nevertheless, she had a documentary to produce, and she meant to do it.
“Are you standing there, living and breathing? Did I film General ?avi? leading the market massacre? Did I get that footage safely out of Kav?ak?”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Your point is taken. This is your home turf. I have no experience in a war zone. I’m ignorant. I admit it. But I don’t deserve to be treated with disrespect.”
She softened her voice, releasing Brenna’s elbow.
“Brenna—you’re making the same mistake with me that I made with you in Washington.”
“I’m being an asshole?”
“You’re precluding a partnership.”
Brenna snorted with disbelief. “A partnership? No. Sam Chisolm wanted me hired and you did his bidding. Not for one moment were you seeking a partnership, because you didn’t want to work with me.” Brenna turned on her heel.
Grace caught up to her. “What’s going on, suddenly?”
“Look,” Brenna said. “I’m taking you sight-seeing, okay? Hospital. Morgue. Cemetery. Black market. Orphanage. All the highlights, all right?”
“All right,” she said cautiously.
“You know,” she said, drumming her fingers on the strap of her backpack, “this will go better once you decide you can trust me.”
Grace wavered. I know what you want, she remembered Brenna telling her at the airport. But I’ll be damned if that’s what I’ll give you.
“Jesus, Alcott.” Brenna spun around and walked off.