by Barry Eisler
But tonight, even the work wasn’t helping her unwind, and she finally gave up, knowing she had to take care of the thing that was keeping her from sleeping. That she’d been struggling with since getting back from Paris.
She threaded her way among the grinders and lathes and other disused machine tools the building owner stored in the space, opened her safe, and took out the satellite phone. She had bought it per Carl’s recommendation, so she supposed it was appropriate that she would use it to call him now. Still, she felt sick about what she knew she had to say.
She walked along the perimeter of the loft to the windows on the north side. She wasn’t worried about snipers. There was no line-of-sight to the loft from the north, and besides, the outside glass was too grime coated to see through. She stopped, closed her eyes for a moment, and focused on her breathing, the way she always had before wrestling and judo matches.
It’s the right thing. Stop thinking about it and just do it. At least then you won’t have to dread it anymore.
But what if the regret was worse than the dread?
She had no answer to that.
She started to turn it all over again in her mind, and stopped herself. She’d been through it more times than she could count. It always ended the same way.
She powered up the unit, blew out a deep breath, and punched in the number.
Two rings, and then the Texas twang: “Hello.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, surprised at the pang his voice produced. For a bad second, she thought she might cry, and furiously suppressed the feeling.
“Hey,” she said.
“Labee,” he said, and she could so clearly imagine his grin. “How are you? Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, mostly. I mean, not like last time.”
Last time had been two would-be assassins at one of the martial-arts schools where she taught women’s self-defense, and a plane brought down to kill the FBI contractor she’d been working with. She’d called Carl then because she was desperate, so desperate she hadn’t even been able to deny it. And while she knew it had been the right thing to do, and a lot of good had come out of it, it had also led to a lot of . . . complicated things happening between them. Including a plan to meet in Portland. Neutral ground—not her Seattle, not his Bali.
“I sure was hoping you’d call,” he said. “I mean, I would have called you, but like I told you in Paris, I know you need your space.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t know what else to say.
There was a long pause.
“Of course I’d like to be wrong,” he said, “but . . . I’m getting the feeling this call might be your way of . . . reiterating that.”
She grimaced. He loved to play the hick, and the routine could be as disarming as it was convincing, but in fact he was so insightful it sometimes unnerved her.
She tried to think of what to say. What came out was “I’m sorry.”
Another pause. “It’s all right,” he said. “I mean, I won’t deny I’m disappointed. And I don’t mean to push, but . . . damn, was it just me? I mean, I thought Paris was special. And not just because the two of us killed a whole bunch of bad people again.”
She laughed softly. That was another thing about him. He could always make her laugh. Even when she was sad. Even when she was terrified.
The way she was right now.
“Was I wrong?” he said. “I mean, if it was just me, if you don’t feel the same way. I know it would be hard for you to say it. But I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you, you’d be making it easier on me by being honest.”
Just tell him about Chief Best. That you’re under a microscope. You have to lay low. You need time. That’s all. You just need time.
She understood why she was so afraid. Every wave of happiness she’d ever managed since the men had taken her and Nason had always been followed by an immediate undertow of fear. Fear that whatever she had, whatever was the source of that moment of pleasure, or joy, or delight, it would be ripped away from her again. The way everything else she had taken for granted had been ripped away: her home, her autonomy, the little sister she loved and for whom she had bartered her own teenaged body to try to protect.
She hadn’t been this afraid in longer than she could remember. Which she supposed was a measure of . . . how happy Carl made her.
Then tell him that. Just tell him. He’s so patient with you. You can trust him.
“Remember you once told me you realized after Thailand you were waiting for me to call?” she said.
“I do. And I was.”
She raised her free hand to her mouth, the knuckles pressed hard against her lips.
“Don’t anymore. I’m sorry.”
She clicked off before he could answer.
Shut down the phone.
Then slid to the floor, her back against the wall, and sobbed, her body shaking with the force of it.
4
Later that morning, Livia was taking care of paperwork in her cubicle at headquarters when her cellphone buzzed. She looked, didn’t recognize the number, and answered. “Hello.”
“Hey there. Let’s not use names just now, okay? I’m close by. I need an hour of your time. Maybe less. Are you at the office now?”
She recognized the confident baritone. B. D. Little, Homeland Security Investigations. The man who had offered her a position with a joint task force investigating Thai human trafficking, a position she’d then used to track down and kill the men who years earlier had taken her and poor, doomed Nason. It turned out Little had known what she would do. Wanted her to do it. And wanted her to do more. He had a tragedy of his own, and Livia was one of the ways he sublimated.
But there would be other ways, too. If she knew anything, she knew that. Little had become an asset, yes, but he was also always a danger.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good. There’s a Starbucks on the northwest corner directly opposite from where you work. It has four upholstered chairs by the windows. I’ll leave a cellphone under the seat cushion of the one closest to the windows and facing the baristas. Get it. Turn off your own phone before you go. Better yet, don’t turn it off, and leave it where you are now. I don’t want any connection between your phone and the one I’m giving you. Nothing to worry about, just being careful.”
Livia had more than enough experience with Gossamer portable cellphone trackers to understand the nature of the precautions. But this level of electronic security was more than Little usually engaged in.
She glanced around. The neighboring cubicles were empty. Still, she kept her voice low. “Five or ten minutes okay?”
“Yes. You’ll see that Signal is installed on the unit, and that there’s a number programmed into it. Use the number to call me right away, will you?”
Signal was an end-to-end encrypted messaging-and-calling app. What the hell was going on? “Okay.”
“The unit I’m calling you from now is a burner. I’ve used it many times to dial random people. So if anyone ever asks—and they won’t—this call you just got was some kind of telemarketer. Okay?”
Livia’s training included undercover operations with the anti-gang unit, the instructors for which were former CIA and FBI. Beyond which, she had her own secrets, and knew how to protect them. So she didn’t appreciate Little’s security primer. But the call was so strange, and his tone so urgent, that she decided to let it go.
“Of course,” she said.
“Thank you.” He clicked off.
She turned her phone to silent, slipped it into a drawer, and stood to head out. As she eased into her windbreaker, Lieutenant Strangeland came from around the corner. Not for the first time, Livia wondered if the woman was mildly psychic.
“Livia,” Strangeland said in her incongruous Brooklyn-transplant accent. “Got a minute?”
“I was just going to grab a coffee across the street. Want me to bring you one?”
“Ah, I’ll go with you. Could use a little air. But what do you mean
, across the street? No Caffe Vita?”
Strangeland knew Livia was particular about coffee. The lieutenant, by contrast, was all about the caffeine.
“It’s raining,” Livia said. “Figured I’d just hit Starbucks.”
“A little rain getting in the way of a gourmet hot beverage? That’s not like you.”
Livia should have realized the lieutenant would spot the anomaly—cops couldn’t help themselves, and Strangeland was one of the best. But there was nothing suspicious about a quick coffee run, and therefore the question was nothing to worry about.
Livia smiled. “You making fun of me?”
“Only a little. Starbucks works. I’ll grab a jacket and meet you in front of the elevators.”
Livia headed down the hall. Strangeland coming along wasn’t a problem, exactly, but on the other hand, it wasn’t good luck, because Little was expecting her call right away. Well, he’d understand that anytime you did something clandestine, the shit-happens factor was always a lot higher. He’d just have to wait. And Livia would have to wait to learn what he wanted.
It was raining harder than Livia had thought, which was fine, as it supported her excuse for the departure from the gourmet-coffee routine. They dashed across the street. As soon as they were inside the Starbucks, Strangeland lowered her hood and said, “I was out yesterday or I would have asked sooner—what did the chief want?”
Yeah, psychic. Or very well informed. “I was going to tell you. Just wanted the coffee first.”
“Haven’t had any yet?”
Another minor anomaly, and again Strangeland was all over it in an instant.
Livia glanced at the chairs Little had described. They were empty.
“Am I hearing this right?” she said. “You’re telling me there’s such a thing as enough coffee?”
Strangeland chuckled. “Just don’t over-caffeinate if you’re facing any follow-up from the chief. Anything she doesn’t have under her thumb, she doesn’t like.”
“You’re talking about me?”
Strangeland raised her eyebrows. “Does she have you under her thumb?”
The lieutenant obviously meant the comment at least half in jest, but even so, the notion of being under someone else’s control made Livia want to push back hard. Still, she managed to dial down her response to a simple “No.”
“Correct. So no, she doesn’t like you, she doesn’t trust you, and worst of all, she can’t figure you out. Why do you think she brought you in without me this time?”
“Yeah, I picked up on that.”
“Well, I hope you survived the interrogation.”
“I think I did.”
“Good. Why don’t we enjoy our coffees here, and you can fill me in.”
“Sure. Black venti big enough?”
Strangeland chuckled. “Yeah, but I’m buying. And no need to ask, I’ll ruin your tall with plenty of milk and plenty of brown sugar. You get us a place to sit.”
Livia made a beeline for the corner. But the chairs Little had described were all too far apart from each other to be suitable for the kind of private conversation Strangeland obviously had in mind. Maybe if the place had been full, but it was actually half empty—the rain momentarily depressing the usual Seattle turnout. In fact, there was a perfect open table right in the corner, and it would look odd if Livia didn’t take it. And with Strangeland already keyed in on two anomalies, Livia didn’t want to risk yet another.
She went over to the empty table and took the chair with a view of the room. Strangeland was focused on paying, but all she would have to do was glance over to catch Livia getting up to retrieve Little’s burner. And the island with sugar and milk would keep the lieutenant facing in the same direction.
Nothing to do but wait. And hope no one sat in that chair.
5
Snake sipped his milkshake, glancing up as a couple of teenagers came in from the rain. Just after three o’clock, so Portland schools were getting out. The McDonald’s was pretty empty—a geezer Snake made as retired; a broken-down-looking dude who was obviously homeless; and a third, younger guy, staring worriedly at a laptop, who Snake made as recently unemployed—but it looked like there would be a little more traffic now.
Of course, Snake wasn’t here for the teenagers. This wasn’t the kind of terrain he and Boomer liked for hunting, and it wasn’t the right time of day.
He liked the milkshake, though. Vanilla, his favorite. He pulled the straw halfway up through the hole in the plastic cap and licked it clean, then pushed it back down again.
Snake was in town to take care of a woman named Hope Jordan, another of Boomer’s high-school conquests. Boomer had told Snake, when they’d finished with Noreen Prentis at the Salton Sea, that there had been other girls in high school who might not have been exactly willing. But Boomer was rich, and popular, and from a powerful family, and most of the girls had convinced themselves afterward that they’d wanted what happened, or at least that it had been their fault and they’d be better off staying quiet. Some of them had even kept on dating him. But there were three, Noreen and Hope and one other who was next on the list, who’d confronted Boomer with words like consent and traumatized and even rape. And nearly caused a major scandal, until Boomer’s old man had intervened.
Boomer had resisted at the Salton Sea when Snake had offered to take care of the other two. But Snake knew his friend. Sometimes Boomer could be reluctant at first, but usually he came around. Going down to Campo for a little weekend hunting trip two weeks after the Salton Sea, and taking that sweet little Native American girl, was probably what made the difference. Just reminded Boomer of what they could get away with, and how much Boomer enjoyed it. Made him feel like Why take chances when my old buddy Snake can make all my problems go away?
So Boomer had given Snake Hope Jordan’s particulars, along with a newer version of one of the cellphone trackers the two of them had used to hunt insurgents in Iraq. And that very morning, Snake had read a text to Hope from her husband, who helpfully reminded her to pick up some kind of muscle-building supplement when she went to Whole Foods later that day. There was only one Whole Foods anywhere close to their house, and Snake had swung by to familiarize himself with the terrain. He liked the parking garage and decided he would do it there. With the tracker, timing his arrival right would be easy.
The hell of it was, Hope hadn’t even gone to the press yet. But Boomer thought she might. And what was the man supposed to do, wait for another Noreen and then have Snake deal with her after? Preempting a problem was risky enough. Another woman dying or disappearing immediately after launching accusations against Boomer would have been too much. It was always better to get out ahead of a problem rather than reacting to it after it had already happened.
It had been interesting hearing Boomer reminisce about high school. They’d never talked much about Boomer’s childhood, and Snake realized now it was because Boomer was embarrassed by his privileged upbringing. Which was nice, in a weird way, but also kind of funny, because number one, Snake couldn’t give a shit, and number two, hell, if he’d had a chance, he would have been happy to grow up privileged himself. It was just that there wasn’t a lot of privilege going around in Aliquippa, or in any of the other dying steel towns in western Pennsylvania. The mill that used to support most of the area had closed not long before Snake was born, and locals had a habit of talking about the better times Snake had never known: this or that business that had previously occupied one of the boarded-up buildings on Franklin Avenue, and how there had been three supermarkets instead of a single convenience store, and how once upon a time they hadn’t even needed metal detectors at the local high school.
Snake didn’t know who his father was, and as far as he was concerned, he didn’t have one, just a succession of stepfathers his mother periodically shacked up with. It hadn’t been so bad when Snake was little, because his mother, Darla, was pretty and so had more of a choice of men. But no one stayed pretty for long in Aliquippa, especially
single mothers with accidental kids and no job skills, not that it mattered much because there weren’t any jobs. So Darla had to start fishing in increasingly polluted parts of the pond, and she got good at overlooking just about anything as long as the man in question was putting a little food on the table. Snake learned fast that no matter what he went crying to her with—a bloody nose, a split lip, once two black eyes so bad he could barely see for almost a week—she’d ask what Snake had done to provoke Tyson, or Mick, or Freddie, and tell him whatever it was, he needed to apologize.
Looking back, though, Snake wasn’t sorry. His childhood had made him tough. He’d been in his first fight at five, and it was pretty much constant after that until he started training at a local boxing gym at twelve. One of the old-timers, a former merchant mariner named Thomas, had shown him what he could get away with when the referee was out of position: axe punches, guillotine punches, hammer punches. And dirty tricks, with names like the pile driver, the foot breaker, the nodder. It wasn’t long before no one wanted to fight Snake anymore, and if he felt like some trouble, he needed to find it in other neighborhoods.
Darla had named him Stephen because she thought Stephen Spencer was a classy name and hoped he’d try to live up to it. So it was funny that two weeks into basic, he’d been christened Snake. During pugil stick training, Snake had beaten a big Georgia cracker named Boyton. Ashamed and in disbelief that a little guy like Snake could have knocked him on his ass, Boyton demanded a two-out-of-three. Snake was happy to oblige, and dropped the dumb fuck even faster the second time.
Snake had known what was coming from the way Boyton kept glaring at him afterward. And right on schedule at chow time, Boyton stalked over to Snake in front of the other recruits, probably thinking that with the padding off now and no rules, he’d get his manhood back. Boyton leaned in, getting in Snake’s face, and said, “You think you’re tough, you little turd? I’ll show you—”