8. Deniz
Chapter 8
Deniz
F or the past three weeks, I’ve been soaking in every drop of information Clara will allow me regarding The Syndicate. She still doesn’t fully trust me—I can’t deny her excellent instincts—but the more I prove myself, the more comfortable she gets.
She never stops working. Even innocuous things, like picking up takeout or scouting a new dry cleaner are actually checking on an informant or sniffing around possible forced labor operations. For the holidays, she brought me to a Turkish sweet shop, and I later discovered that the owner does Turkish and Arabic translations for The Syndicate.
But today is different. Clara was sitting at the kitchen table when I woke up this morning, already dressed in black cargo pants and a long-sleeved, fitted shirt. Her hair was slicked back, curls pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. When she noticed me standing in the hallway rubbing the sleep from my eyes, she picked up a black file and tossed it toward me, so it landed right in front of the chair I usually eat at.
“We have a date,” was all she said.
So now I’m in an outfit strikingly similar to Clara’s, though not quite as skin-tight, sitting beside her in the back seat of an early 2000s SUV with blacked-out windows. We’re in the Imperial Valley, a small stretch of oasis by the Salton Sea that’s a haven within the surrounding desert. I’ve never been here before, but even without the benefit of sunlight I can tell that this town is nearly abandoned. There’s a gas station about a mile or so down the road, the single lit sign in the vicinity.
Lee sits in the front seat, their eyes trained on a few other cars in the distance. Their white-blonde eyebrows are furrowed in concentration, the pale skin of their forehead creasing deeply in the center. I have no idea if the vehicles are friend or foe, and I’m not sure I’m ready to learn. The death of my brother inspired viciousness in me, but solely for the person who started the fire, and the family that prompted their actions. Two years ago, my friends would have called me passive. Bashir would have called me a nerd, and Chase would have found a more colorful term. Clara alone sparks the murderous rage I’ve harbored the last few months.
Honestly, I’m really not all that good with the sight of blood.
The silence I’m ruminating in is broken by the sound of Clara disengaging and reengaging the safety on her pistol. I watched her harness it at her side as we left my apartment and knew tonight was going to be a trial by fire, literally.
“The men inside the house we’re about to raid are a lot like the people I’ve told you about the past few weeks. But they don’t need to risk flights or cargo ships or border crossings. They come to places like this, where opportunities are thin and people are desperate and vulnerable. They tell a family they can get their daughter work in San Diego or LA, cleaning houses or working a desk job. Or they go straight to the source, telling a teenage girl she could support her family, relieve some of the burden her parents face every day.
“But they keep demanding more. Pictures, favors, dances. On and on and on, until she’s isolated from everyone she’s ever known. Until she doesn’t have access to a phone or a car to get out. Or sometimes, especially here, he’ll tell her that he’ll call immigration on her family. It doesn’t matter if they’re documented or not, she knows the agents will talk to the neighbors too, search her parents' work and the community that raised her. Suddenly, if she tries to save herself, she’s putting everyone she’s ever known at risk.”
Clara takes a deep breath, one I can’t seem to match. I knew things like this happened, was even aware they were probably happening directly beneath my nose. But the problem seemed so distant and insurmountably large that it almost didn’t feel real.
“The suffering of the world isn’t your responsibility,” I say, and though it’s directed at her, I know it’s self-soothing. The side of her lip tilts up in a sad smile.
“That’s what I need you to understand, Deniz. Everyone makes that excuse. I’m not evil, and I can’t eradicate evil, so I’ll distance myself from evil . But all that makes are more victims.” She steels herself, checking the safety once more and slipping her weapon into its home at her hip. “My family chose a long time ago to be people who ended that cycle, who decided that if it took immersing oneself in evil to eradicate it, we would be willing. We can’t save everyone, or fix every problem. But we do what we can, by any means necessary.”
The silence stretches between us, only marred by the soft chirping of crickets outside the car. My chest tightens at the contradiction in her words.
“Don’t you worry about the consequences of becoming the judge, jury, and executioner of the world’s evil?” I ask, wondering if her answer will be enough for me. If suddenly, the altruism of her family’s work will break through my grief, and I won’t blame her any longer.
“No,” she says, and the confidence in her voice snuffs out that hope. “It’s my birthright.”
I had wondered, when I first started looking into her family, if they cared at all about the devastating ripple effects of their actions. But despite the fact that her life’s work is protecting victims from this horrible violence, she clearly doesn't care that her altruism could have unintended consequences. She feels no shame or grief for the indirect casualties of the wars she fights. Any person worthy of compassion would hesitate and feel the burden of the choices she makes. But Kerem’s life was nothing to her. A blip on the radar, collateral damage of what she feels she is owed.
Lee tilts their chin up, their first movement since we parked the car, and Clara’s demeanor shifts. The muscles in her shoulders are strung taut under the tight fabric of her shirt, her body suddenly emitting a low vibration, like a jungle cat readying to attack. She pulls her phone from her pocket and sends a message without even looking at the screen, eyes trained on the house three doors down.
I have no idea what Lee saw, but it was some kind of signal. And I feel ill-prepared for whatever follows.
“You stay close behind me—no more than three steps,” she directs, swiping away something that lights up her phone before shutting it off. “There are two others from our crew in the gas station parking lot; they’ll go in before us. Follow my lead, and you won’t get killed.”
I stare at her incredulously, my brain slow to catch up with what she’s telling me.
“I’m sorry, are we about to raid a house? A trafficker’ s house? And you’re having me come with you unarmed?” Each question pitches higher and higher, but Clara doesn’t seem to notice. Lee, however, huffs a laugh.
“Have you ever fired a gun before?” she asks in a tone that tells me she thinks she knows the answer. She’s perfectly unaware that Chase has been giving me lessons since the day I identified the connection to The Syndicate. “Have you handled one? Seen one in real life before today?” My silence is answer enough for her, and she twitches her head to the side as two men make their way down the street. “Exactly. I won’t have you accidentally killing yourself—or worse, me —because you don’t know which way to point the barrel.”
There’s no point in arguing; there isn’t time. Clara pops open her door as the other two men arrive at the driveway. The sound feels like thunder in the silence around us, but she just slides out of the car, beckoning for me to follow her.
Against every grain of self-preservation I’ve ever had, I follow. I’ll tell myself tomorrow it’s because I need her to trust me. But if I’m honest with myself, I want to see this. I want to reaffirm her soullessness and watch her slaughter people without regret. I need to see the monster I will be destroying.
I close the car door as silently as I can, leaving Lee behind as we tread on silent feet toward the dilapidated house. The two other crew members—both men with close-cropped hair—are picking the lock on the front door as we hit the sidewalk, and are already in the house when we reach the front door.
I don’t know why I expected bright lights and an immediate shoot out, maybe too many action movies as a kid. But Clara and the two men are nearly silent as they search the house. Years of training must make their eyesight better than mine, because I’m barely able to see Clara in front of me as we clear each room. Toward the end of the hall, there’s a door with a padlock securing it shut. I feel, more than see, Clara shake her head, and turn toward the cracked door across from it.
My steps seem abnormally loud as we cross into the room. In the bed at the far wall is a figure, hidden underneath a heap of blankets. The person’s chest or back, I can’t tell from this position, rises and falls with the breaths of a deep sleep. Clara and I take one side of the bed, while the two men take the other.
My heartbeat is thrumming in my neck as I berate myself for not asking Clara more questions. What’s their plan? Are they here to kill him? Kidnap? Torture?
My thoughts don’t have a chance to spiral before three flashlights illuminate, and a noise erupts through the room. The man in the bed bolts awake, his eyes filled with terror as demands for him to put his hands up fill the air. Instinct kicks in, and he reaches toward his nightstand, just for Clara to smack him across the face with her pistol. He screams in agony while our partners drag him out of bed and onto his knees on the floor while he sends expletives our way. Finally, after what seems like endless chaos, the two men back away, cocking their guns at the back of our captive’s head as Clara moves to stand in front of him.
“Damen, lights please, if you will,” she requests, her voice so soft in comparison to the mayhem that was just silenced.
The taller of the two turns the overhead lights on, and for the first time, I get a good look at the man Clara is about to kill. He’s gangly, with greasy hair falling across his forehead. His eyes are sunken, a bleary blue-gray that makes him look sickly. He’s dressed in thin, checkered boxers, his chest concave and skin sallow. He looks like he needs a medical professional.
I realize that I’m basically hiding behind Clara, so I take a step back and lean against the wall, pretending that none of this affects me. I may be familiar with the darker corners of the world thanks to my field of work, but that doesn’t mean I often see it firsthand. The adrenaline of it all makes me nauseous, feeling a lot like when a ten-year-old Kerem begged me to take him on a massive roller coaster.
“That’s so much better, isn’t it?” Clara asks, holstering her weapon and smiling down at him. “Now, Mr. Clemson, I think we have some things to discuss.”
He breathes heavily while he tries to orient himself. He licks his lips as he assesses Clara, his eyes tracking up and down her frame. My body acts before my mind can catch up, and I move away from the wall to stand right behind her so that we’re almost touching.
Clara turns her chin to look at me, a surprised and taunting smile gracing her lips, until Mr. Clemson’s voice turns her back to him.
“You don’t look like a cop,” he says, coughing on his own words. Or maybe that’s the blood in his mouth from where Clara struck him. There’s a mean welt forming on his cheek, and I’m surprised by the satisfaction I feel knowing he’s in pain.
“So observant,” Clara coos, her tone very similar to when she blackmailed me. “No, unfortunately, you’re not lucky enough to have been caught by the police.”
He shifts on his knees, rubbing the side of his face against his shoulder and wincing in pain.
“Well then what the fuck do you want?” he demands, looking back at the two guns pointed directly at his head before turning to Clara. She seems completely unbothered by this whole situation as she kneels down so they’re eye to eye.
“I want you to tell me where the girls are, Terry,” she whispers, leaning. While he doesn’t seem surprised, his eyes narrow. When Clara pulls back, there’s a split second of silence before Terry spits directly in her face.
I’m moving before the words go fuck yourself are even out of his mouth. Clara doesn’t react as I grab a fistful of his hair and yank it backward. He yelps in pain, screaming for me to let him go.
“Apologize,” I demand, watching tears form in the corners of his eyes. He struggles against my grip, refusing to open his mouth until I twist harder.
“Fuck man, sorry or whatever,” he pants, and I only yank him harder by the roots, unsatisfied with the insincerity in his words. I hear Clara clear her throat.
“Down, boy,” she nearly laughs, and suddenly I snap out of whatever primitive instinct took over. She’s standing behind me, watching with a sense of amusement that either turns me on or pisses me off. Probably both. Whenever I’m around this woman, it’s like every instinct I’ve ever had gets muddied, every wire gets crossed. Rage toward her becomes lust, and any forceful emotion gets redirected to the closest target.
As I let go of Terry’s hair, watching him hunch over on himself and continue cursing, I realize how bad it is. Watching her for so long, being obsessed with her, has completely fucked me over. None of my emotional reactions make any sense.
“Now that wasn’t very cooperative of you, was it Terry?” Clara asks, pulling a knife from her waistband. “I’m not a big fan of mess, but it seems you might need some additional motivation. So I’m going to make you a deal.” She squats down in front of him again, securing his wrist in her hand and pressing the blade of the knife against his finger. “We’re going to see how compliant you can be. You’re going to tell me how many girls are in the padlocked room, and if you do, you keep your fingers. Do you understand?”
Terry’s breathing becomes erratic as his panic rises. He doesn’t say a word, pressing his lips together as he starts to shake. Clara waits, staring at him with her eyebrows raised like a teacher waiting for the answer to a question. After a minute, she sighs.
“Disappointing,” she states simply, and without a lick of hesitation, she flicks her wrist.
There must be no one left in this neighborhood, because Terry’s screams could wake up an entire block. Droplets of his blood dust the side of Clara’s neck, but much more trickles down his arm as he struggles against Clara’s grip. I breathe through my nose, trying my best not to let the sight of his finger on the floor affect me. Fuck, I hate blood.
“Let’s try this again,” Clara says, projecting her voice to be heard over Terry’s continued cries. “How many girls, Terry?” She waits a few more breaths, watching tears run down his face, before angling the blade against his next finger. “If you insist…”
“Wait, stop,” he scrambles, yanking his hand back against his chest. Clara lets it go. “There’s six. Six girls.”
She smiles at him, and it’s like a cat, or a shark, or some horrifying creature of the deep, especially with the blood splatter still painting her skin. If she smiled at me like that, I’d run for my life. I might rather lose the fingers.
“See, I knew you’d make the right decision,” she says, giving the guy not named Damen some sort of signal before turning to me. “You’re going to go with Samuel and take the girls to the cars down the street. Follow his instructions. Both of you will come right back here when the cars leave. Do you understand?”
I nod, unable to do anything but follow her instructions. There’s no way this is over, and the fear she’s already instilled, both in Terry and in me, is making my resolve weak.Samuel’s opening the door when I get to him, and a dark stairwell appears before us. This is California, so there shouldn’t be a basement here, and yet the rickety stairs disappear into an unlit room.
“Stay behind me,” he whispers without turning around, and then slowly starts down the stairs, his pistol aimed in front of him. I can hear faint whispering in the darkness, and stick close to him as we creep our way down. On the landing, he flicks on a light. What I see before me makes the nausea one thousand times worse.
Six girls, like Terry said. They look like teenagers, all standing in a tight group in the back of the room. The oldest two place their bodies in front of the rest, their eyes filled with fear and desperation.
“Don’t come any closer,” one of them says. She’s tall, with straight brown hair pulled into a low ponytail. Her clothes are clean, but her skin is covered in dirt.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I say without thinking, and Samuel turns over his shoulder to glare at me.
“He’s right, we’re here to take you home,” Sam says, holstering his weapon. The girl who spoke narrows her eyes, assessing him while still keeping her body in front of the rest of the group. She’s brave. Once she trusts us, the rest will fall in line behind her.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asks, her voice fierce. Samuel hesitates, but I nudge him with my shoulder.
“Wait here,” I mutter, and don’t wait for his response before I run back up the stairs. When I return to Terry’s room, Clara is leaning against the far wall, spinning the bloody knife between her fingers. Terry’s still on his knees clutching his mutilated hand to his chest with Damen’s gun pointed at him. Clara raises her eyebrows at me when I enter the room, but doesn’t seem all that surprised at my return. Maybe in this mindset, nothing can truly faze her.
“Can I borrow him for a minute?” I ask, gesturing toward Terry. She considers me and then agrees.
“Damen, escort him down please,” Clara directs. Terry fights at first, pulling against Damen’s hold as he’s yanked to his feet, but eventually we make our way back down to the basement crawlspace. I grab Terry by the scruff of his neck and shove him forward.
The brave girl looks at the man with his arms secured behind his back. Her eyes flicker to Damen, still holding a gun to Terry’s head, and then zero in on his bloody hand.
After a long silence, the girl swallows thickly and nods. Everything after that moves quickly. Damen takes Terry back upstairs, and Samuel and I lead the girls out through the front door of the house. After the bright lights of Terry’s room, the darkness seems so much more oppressive. I blink away the spots in my eyes as I take the tail of our caravan, ensuring all six girls follow Sam down the road. His head is on a swivel, hand hovering over his still-holstered weapon.
Once at the end of the street, we load the girls into the vans idling on the corner. There’s a young woman in the driver's seat of each car, and they smile at the girls and give them granola bars as they get settled. I watch the two eldest girls silently agree to split up, and it leaves me speechless. They’re too young to have learned to put themselves in more danger to protect those around them.
When the final door shuts and the vans make their way down the street, headlights still off, Samuel tugs on my arm and we start back toward the house.
The thought of seeing Terry’s blood soaked into the dingy carpet of this room has my stomach rolling again, but I swallow down the feeling and force myself back to the house. Samuel and I return to Terry’s room, the scene almost exactly the same as we left it. Clara doesn't waste any time.
“I’m glad you’ve shown you can be a team player, Terry,” she says, pacing in front of him as I take her place against the wall. “ I hope you will be equally forthcoming during this next part of our evening.”
Terry looks defeated, and I can’t say I’d look any better if I were in his position. He must know he’s going to die, no matter what he tells her. Will he want to clear his guilty conscience, or take his secrets to the grave?
“I’ll tell you whatever you want, please don’t kill me,” he begs, his shoulders collapsing in.
“We’ll have to see about that,” Clara taunts, pointing her knife his way. He flinches, bumping into Damen, who places his boot in the center of his back and shoves him forward. Terry hits the ground face first, and both Clara and I grimace as he cries out in pain.
“Pull him up,” she demands, but Samuel is already forcing Terry to his knees. Blood runs from his clearly broken nose as he babbles, promising to tell Clara anything she wants.
I don’t feel any pity, not one singular ounce. For every tear that falls down his face, every line of pain etched into his skin, all I see is that teenage girl putting her body in front of all the others behind her. In the face of some of the worst things a person could experience, she was more courageous than this piece of filth has ever been.
“You’re going to tell me about the employers you send these girls to.” Clara’s voice cuts through my thoughts, focusing me back into the present, where her knife is pressed to Terry’s broken nose. “And you’re going to tell me how many women and girls they’ve bought from you.”
Terry doesn’t fight. Names, numbers of victims, and locations fall out of his mouth like a stream of consciousness. Clara doesn't write anything down, simply stares at him with the kind of intense focus that could light a fire. It doesn’t take long to get through everything he knows—even I can tell he’s not operating some complicated, high-end operation. When his head sags and he swears that’s all he knows, Clara turns to me.
My blood runs ice cold at the look in her eyes. All the brutality I’ve assumed she was capable of is clear in her stare. I can’t say I blame her. If I had seen this same scene, and worse, repeatedly throughout my life, I don’t know if I’d even have as much humanity left as she does.
“I want you to decide, Deniz.” Her voice brokers no argument, no bartering. “Does he live or die?”
I stare at her as Terry’s sobs rip through the silence. My heart should be pounding, but it feels like it’s not moving fast enough, like there’s not enough oxygen in my blood. I don’t even know how I get my next question out.
“What will he do if he lives?” I ask, hating that it’s even a question. Hating that my instinctual response isn’t to turn him over to the criminal justice system.
“We’ll tip off the police, but he will likely inform his clients before we can get to them. We’ll provide as much evidence as we can, but you can guess how that would go,” Clara sneers. Terry blubbers behind her, swearing up and down that he won’t call anyone, that no one will know what happened. But I can feel that Clara is right. And if she is, and I choose to let him live, all of the girls and women Terry told us about could be moved, hidden, or disposed of.
Cold sweat breaks out on my neck as I realize why Clara brought me here. Not only to witness her work, to implicate me in any crimes being committed. But to prove to both me and her that I would make the same decisions she would. That I understand the work of The Syndicate, the logic and empathy behind the violence.
Bile burns in my throat, and I can’t tear my gaze from hers. My vision swims, and instead of Clara’s brown eyes, I see Kerem’s bright green ones, then that brave girl’s. My breath is thin in my lungs. The sound of my mother’s cries as we buried her baby boy mixes with the whispers of those girls as we came down the stairs, and I wonder if there truly is anything righteous in this world. Even vengeance.
“Kill him.”
Terry begs, but I barely hear it as Clara unholsters her weapon. Without a single word, she aims the gun at the center of Terry’s head, and fires.