by Tom Clancy
Kirby inhaled, exhaled. He could feel the silence of the room pressing down on him with a weight that was almost tangible.
"If that's true," he said, "it would at least suggest that Armitage is in somebody's pocket."
"Yes." Gordian's tone was flat. "It would."
The two men faced each other soberly, their eyes holding.
"You have any idea who that somebody might be?" Kirby asked.
Gordian sat there quietly while the antique clock across the room ticked off a full minute.
"No," he replied at last, hoping his sincerity would be accepted without challenge.
He was, after all, lying through his teeth.
Chapter Three
SINGAPORE/JOHOR, MALAYSIA
SEPTEMBER 16, 2000
"Take my word for it, this here country would be the perfect retirement spot for Barney the Dinosaur," an American expatriate in Singapore once told a visitor from New York City. Or so he was quoted in the press, at any rate.
The comment — which was made in response to an inquiry about where some risque entertainment might be found, and would later become famous throughout the island — was overheard by a magazine writer amid the cacophonous chirping, tweeting, and trilling of innumerable performing birds. It was a Sunday morning, and Singaporean bird fanciers, mostly ethnic Chinese, had brought their thrushes, mata putehs, and sharmas out for the weekly avian singing competition at the intersection of Tiong Bahru and Seng Poh Roads, hanging their bamboo cages from specially built trellises above the public benches and outdoor cafe tables lining the street.
"You want cheap thrills, you got literally two options: dream X-rated tonight, or head on over to Fat B's, at the east end," the expat had continued to the utter mystification of his visiting friend… and the gleeful amusement of the eavesdropping writer, who, realizing she'd stumbled upon a perfect opener for her regular Lifestyles column, listened carefully while the birds peeped and cheeped their bright, vacant melodies into the sunshiny air.
Indeed, Fat B's, a decadent hole-in-the-wall tucked away behind a rotted shop-house facade in a narrow Geylang District larong, was unquestionably the seediest bar on the island republic. It was also a very busy place, drawing patrons night after night despite the stringent national morals laws, clinging to its grubby existence like some resistant bacilli on an otherwise scrubbed and sanitized operating room surface. Exactly why authorities tolerated it was anyone's guess, although there were rumors of ongoing bribes to police officials, and compromising photographs that had been waved over the head of a high-placed government minister as insurance against a shutdown.
With its crumbling walls and ceiling covered with purple foil, bathed in black light, and decorated with giant crepe-paper rafflesias, painted wooden folk masks, blowpipes, bead strings, dragon banners, and century-old human skulls that had once hung in the longhouses of Borneo headhunters, the interior of the bar was outdone in crassness only by its owner, Fat B… who, contrary to what his name suggested, was not fat at all, but physically slight, and had gained a reputation for being a bold exclamation point of a man through a mixture of conspicuously non-Singaporean aggressiveness and flamboyance, characteristics he was supposed to have inherited from his wealthy Straits Chinese ancestors. Those who had business dealings with him also knew of a certain hard, forbidding look that became evident in his eyes when his anger or suspicion was aroused, giving him, at such times, the appearance of a wary crocodile.
Tonight Fat B was wearing a collarless yellow silk shirt printed with colorful explosions of peonies, black sharkskin slacks, a diamond stud in his right earlobe, and jade-encrusted rings on eight of his fingers. His jet-black hair was slicked straight back over his head and had an almost buffed appearance. He sat at his usual table in the rear of the bar, his back to the wall, keeping a watchful eye on every coming and going at the door.
"Here's what you came for, Xiang," he said, sliding a brown manilla envelope to the big, long-haired man seated opposite him. "Odd how so much effort goes into providing such a slim package. But it's just that way when you're trading in information. It weighs nothing and everything at the same time, lah"
Xiang just looked at him, then silently reached out for the envelope and lifted it off the table. Fat B tried not to show that he'd noticed the kris tattoo on the back of his hand, thinking his interest wouldn't be at all appreciated… not by this retrograde brute. Still, he continued to regard him with hooded fascination. In the old days, his people had run around the Malaysian jungles stark naked — or just about — their skin covered with dragons, scorpions, and the like, flaunting those tattoos as symbols of courage and manhood.
His eyelids half lowered, Fat B wondered if the muscular Iban's entire body was adorned with such markings, and considered what an impressive sight that would be. Impressive and, no doubt, very painfully achieved.
Seemingly oblivious to the barkeeper's scrutiny, Xiang unclasped the envelope, folded back its flap, and looked inside.
Fat B watched and waited. Pop music squalled from stereo speakers at the four corners of the room, Eastern lutes, harps, and cymbals looping discordantly over Western-style synthesizers and electric guitars. Strobes splashed the foil-draped walls with violet light. Bar girls in short skirts and tight, swoop-necked blouses, and with too much makeup on their faces, laughed showily with the men who were paying for their drinks. Most of the women carried small purses that opened only after they led their companions into the staircase behind the barroom, or up to the small, private rooms on the building's second floor. Then they would make their illicit transactions, willing flesh for cold cash, fifty percent of which went into Fat B's pocket.
For no particular reason, Fat B thought suddenly of an ancient Chinese expression: Everything can be eaten.
His lips puckered thoughtfully, he stared across the room at the pair of men who had arrived with Xiang. They hovered near the entrance in their shabby clothes, one dragging on a cigarette and looking directly back at him, the other gazing upward at the wall, apparently studying the painted folk masks. Both also would have the dagger tattoo on their hands, of course.
Glancing cautiously over each shoulder to make sure he wasn't being watched, Xiang undipped the envelope and looked inside. It contained a stack of nine or ten photographs. Reaching in with one hand, he pulled them out just far enough to expose their upper borders, and then gave them a quick scan, riffling their edges with his thumb, ignoring the sheet of paper clipped to the last snapshot. Then he returned them to the envelope, closed the flap, and looked back up at Fat B.
"Who's the girl?" he said in English.
"It's all in the little fact sheet I enclosed. Her name is Kirsten Chu and she is employed by a company called Monolith Technologies. Very attractive, don't you think?" Fat B offered the pirate a relaxed smile. "It's unfortunate her parents stuck her with a Western name, but I believe she was born and educated in Britain. So it goes."
Xiang stared at him, his eyes flat. "You know what I mean. I didn't expect there to be two of them."
Fat B tried to look as if there was nothing about the envelope's contents that should have required explanation.
"Listen," he said. "She's just a beautiful lure dangling at the end of a very short line, you understand? Her movements are easy to track. Stay on her and she'll lead you to the American."
"What's their connection?"
"I don't ask, our employers don't tell."
"She a national?"
Fat B waited a moment before he replied, listening to shrieky Chinese vocals pierce a loud disco rhythm thudding from the sound system. Ordinarily he enjoyed the ratcheted-up volume and uneasy merging of musical traditions, but now it was all starting to grate on him, the sweeps of electronic sound jangling his nerves, the female rap singer's falsetto highs tearing into his eardrums like steel spikes.
He'd been optimistic things would go more smoothly.
He took a deep breath, exhaled, then finally nodded, his smile tightening at t
he corners.
"Don't make more out of this than there is," he said. "It isn't that big a deal."
"Bullshit. You think I'm stupid? An American with no business being in this country disappears, it's one thing to clean it up afterward. But a citizen? A woman! You've got to be joking. Something goes wrong and we're caught, I can look forward to a lot worse than six strokes of the rotan"
Fab B chuckled. "In Singapore, a fellow with my habits and appetites is liable to receive that sort of punishment just for getting out of bed in the morning. It might be said that our system of justice stems directly from Christian notions of original sin."
Xiang looked at him with his dark, empty eyes but said nothing.
Apparently, Fat B thought, his little stab at humor had gone over the ah beng's head. In fact, he himself was no longer smiling, his mood having taken a sharp and rather abrupt downturn in the past few seconds. It wasn't as if the money was coming out of his own pocket, but he didn't like being interposed between this thug and their mutual employers. Negotiation wasn't his favorite activity, and he'd hoped — perhaps foolishly — that the pirate would simply take the envelope and leave.
"Really, what's the problem?" he said. "If you can grab both of them alive, fine. But it's this Blackburn who's truly valuable to our employers. Your main concern with the woman should be making certain she isn't left behind as a witness."
"If this is so easy, why couldn't your people take care of it? They followed her. They took the pictures. They could have gone ahead with the next step."
"We each have different ways of making ourselves useful. This country is where I live, you understand? I'm here for the long term. You're in and out, lah" Fat B shrugged again. "Let's not waste any more breath discussing it. We're both already committed, after all."
Xiang was silent. Fat B stared past him at the door, waiting for him to make up his mind, anxious for their transaction to be concluded. How had he wound up haggling with the brutish creature? The whole distasteful episode had given him a headache.
He waited some more, watching a couple of grimy men step in from the alley and then head over to the bar.
"All right," the pirate said at last. "But I better get the rest of my money soon as it's done. You better make sure of it."
Fat B looked at him with quiet malice.
"Of course," he said, nodding. "It will be my pleasure."
The two men regarded each other a moment without exchanging another word. Then Xiang stuffed the envelope containing the photos under his denim jacket, pushed his chair back from the table with his feet, got up, strode to the entrance, and departed, his two companions falling in at his rear.
A small hiss slipping through his front teeth, Fat B sat very still and watched the door swing shut behind them.
Blackburn had picked up the puppet at an open-air bazaar — this was a while back, during Dipvali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. Needing a break from his responsibilities at the ground station, he had taken a few days off and gone to the coast to enjoy the frenetic celebration, taking in the sidewalk dancers, musicians, and magicians, sampling the delicious curries and satays, browsing the crafts stalls, and just strolling at his leisure amid the exuberant banners, floral decorations, sprays of colored rice, and endless strings of candles, lamps, and lightbulbs brightening every door and window.
Wearing an elaborate turban with a peacock feather jutting straight up out of its bottom wind, a maroon shirt with glittery gold threads woven through its fabric in vertical stripes, and steel bangles on one skinny wrist, the vendor who'd sold Blackburn the puppet had looked like a street-corner sultan in his holiday finery. His open, spirited smile had revealed the black-stained teeth and reddened gums that were telltale signs of habitual betel chewing — an addictive concoction with mildly intoxicating properties, the betel probably made him look ten years older than his natural age.
Blackburn remembered the strong scent of exotic spice on his breath as he had stepped up close to make his pitch, a pair of two-dimensional leather puppets in each hand, waving them aloft on slender rods. He remembered their painted colors looking gaudy and brilliant in the midday sunshine, remembered the exquisite detail of their hand-tooled features, and most especially remembered admiring the workmanship of the one in the vendor's left hand. The one that had, in fact, first caught his eye, and was now hanging above him on the wall of his office — some sort of animistic figure, part elephant, part man.
"Fifty ringgits, twenty-five American dollars!" the man had been shouting as he manipulated the puppet over his head. Out of curiosity, Blackburn had stopped to ask the vendor which Hindu diety the puppet represented, speaking English because he had not yet become proficient in Bahasa, having been in Malaysia less than a month at the time.
Smiling his big, resin-stained smile, wagging his head up and down as if he'd understood Blackburn, the vendor had thrust the puppet into his face and enthusiastically hollered, "Yes, yes! Fifty ringgits, twenty-five American dollars!"
"It's Ganesha, son of Shiva…."
The voice was female and carried a musical British accent. Blackburn had turned in its direction to see an Oriental woman of perhaps thirty or thirty-five, a strikingly beautiful woman with a sweep of angle-cut black hair, slanted brown eyes, and skin that had been tanned the color of almonds and cream in the perpetual August of the tropics. Wearing summer khakis, a loose cotton blouse, and sandals, she was carrying a Coach handbag over her shoulder, a bag he'd known must have cost more than the combined yearly income of everyone living in that village.
Blackburn remembered immediately noticing that she had a magnificent body. Even through her baggy clothes, he'd been able to tell. It was the way she carried herself, he supposed. But he'd always had an eye for that sort of thing.
One of your best assets in the field, he thought now, three months later, his face troubled, his inner voice edged with self-contempt. Sitting by the phone in his office, he couldn't remember whether the desire to go to bed with her, and the idea of convincing her to become a fly on Marcus Caine's wall, had been linked from the very beginning. Oh, he'd felt a superficial attraction right away, but when had he ever met a good-looking women he hadn 't thought would be fun in the sack?
Actually wanting her was another story, though. Wanting her, and then deciding he could use her…
He thought suddenly and unexpectedly about Megan Breen and how different it had been when they were together. Not better, but easier, without guilt. They had liked each other and felt lonely and isolated in the bleak Russian winter. Neither had held expectations of their affair going beyond what it was. There had been no secret agendas between them, nothing to hide. It had been up front and without manipulation, the lines and limits clearly defined.
Of course, he hadn't known who she worked for until at least five minutes into their conversation, which had begun with them chatting about the puppet.
"… a god representing man's animal nature," she had said.
He'd looked at her and smiled. "Thanks. Sounds like the perfect mascot for my office."
"You'll see his image on a lot of pendants and charms," she said, returning his smile. "They're worn as protection against evil and bad fortune."
"Better than perfect," he said. "Think I'll hang him right over my phone. For when the boss calls to check up on me."
Her amused grin broadened.
"I can tell you the asking price is very fair," she said. "A lot of time goes into making these wayang kulit puppets, at least the quality ones. This man's even have bison horn rods."
"Is that also supposed to be good luck?"
"Not if you're a bison, I suppose. But it shows quality workmanship. Most of the puppets they sell to tourists have wooden rods."
Blackburn looked into her dark brown eyes, and realized she was studying his own. "That phrase you used… wayang…."
"Kulit" she said. "Roughly translated, it means 'shadow play.' An enactment of the Hindu epics using maybe a hundred puppets, and a ful
l orchestra. It's an ancient form of entertainment in this part of the world, and a way of keeping certain traditions alive. These days, though, Nintendo beats it hands down for popularity."
"Same old, same old, I guess," he said.
"Maybe so, but it's an awful shame. The puppet masters — they're called dayangs — spend years and years learning their craft. They make their puppets by hand, and provide the voices and movements of all the characters. During a show the puppets are manipulated behind a white cotton screen, with oil lamps throwing their shadows onto it — when the lighting's done right, the shadows are colored, you know. The audience is split into two groups, so that one group sees the shadow play in front of the screen, and the other sees the puppet show and musicians behind it."
"Representing the separation between the material and the sublime, the self and the godhead," he said. "Worldly illusion and ultimate truth—"
"Atman and Brahman," she said, giving him a look that was comprised of equal parts surprise and curiosity. "I see you're familiar with Hindu philosophy."
"The Beatles school, anyway," he said. "I must have worn out five copies of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass when I was in college."
They stood there silently a moment, facing each other, their eyes still in contact. The crowd jostling around them, the pungent smell of cooking smoke thick in the sultry air.
"Fifty ringgits, twenty-five American dollars!" the vendor yelled at the top of his lungs, pushing up closer to them, obviously worried that he'd been forgotten.
Blackburn reached into his pocket for his wallet, got out two bills — a twenty and a five, U. S. currency — and payed for the puppet. The vendor gave him a little bow of thanks and briskly moved off into the crowd, leaving Blackburn holding his new acquisition with a faint look of bemusement on his face, like someone who has won a stuffed animal at a country fair shooting gallery and abruptly realizes he hasn't the slightest idea what he's going to do with it.
"Well," the woman said. "I'm sure the puppet will make an interesting conversation piece when you bring it to work with you. Don't see many like it in the States, I'll bet."