Kate stood and didn’t look at the man as she headed toward the exit, the doors opening and guillotining closed behind her.
She stepped into the toilet, keeping the door open a crack. After a few seconds she heard the hiss and suck as the doors of the dining car opened followed by the scuff of a footstep and she came out fast and hit the sandy-haired man in the throat with the blade of her hand.
She was a bit off her game—a few years ago the blow would have killed him, but she missed the hyoid and he merely grunted and buckled and she dragged him into the toilet, kicking the door closed behind her.
Kate felt the shape of a pistol at his hip. She freed a Beretta 92FS sporting a YHM Wraith suppressor from his jeans and was tempted to use it, but even the muffled report would be dangerously loud in this confined space, so she dropped it into the stainless steel sink.
The man threw his weight back and her skull smashed against the bulkhead. He tried to turn and she rabbit punched him in the kidneys and he whinnied and sank. Still shaking off the blow to the head, she didn’t follow up fast enough and he sent back an elbow to her solar plexus and she felt the air leave her. He managed to spin and punch her in the ribs and caught her with a right to the jaw that was hard enough to dim the lights.
She was on her back and he dropped onto her with one knee, pinning her to the floor, simultaneously reaching into the sink and retrieving the gun.
As she saw the black snout of the suppressor pointing at her she drove a knee into his groin and lashed out with her fist, knocking the weapon from his hand. She reached up and jammed a thumb into his eye socket and crushed his eyeball.
He screamed almost soundlessly.
She forced him to his knees, got above him, took his head in her hands and broke his neck.
Kate stood, gripping the sink, and vomited, then rinsed her mouth and her face and finger combed her hair in the mirror. She quit the toilet, pulling the door closed after her, and went back into the dining car where Suzie sat staring at her with a look of terror on her face.
The train’s PA was announcing their arrival at somewhere called Büchen, and Kate took Suzie’s hand and said, “Come, quickly.”
She walked her through to their carriage and grabbed their bags and joined the few people waiting at the doors.
The train stopped and Kate took the child’s hand again and they hurried into the night, to find a taxi to take them to Hamburg.
As they passed beneath a streetlight Suzie said, “You’ve got blood on you. On your sleeve.”
Kate looked down and saw it was true. She folded the sleeve back. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s not mine.”
FOURTEEN
As the old elevator sighed and creaked upward with painful slowness, its winding drum moaning ominously, Lucien Benway stood staring through the scissor gate at the passing floors, trying to ignore the smell of urine and worse.
There had been a terse message from Dudley Morse on Benway’s cell when he’d fired it up after landing at Dulles, his head thick with Scotch and travel fatigue. He’d called Morse, expecting news of Kate Swift, but the pale man had summoned him here.
At last the cage lurched to a halt and Benway shoved the folding gate aside and stepped out. Only one of the overhead lights worked, and it fizzed and strobed, illuminating the passageway in hard green bursts.
Morse, standing in front of a closed door, his feet planted wide apart, his hands behind his back, came to semi-attention as Benway approached him.
“Sir.”
Morse pushed the door open and stepped aside, allowing Benway a view of as sorry a hotel room as he had ever seen.
His wife lay supine on the roiled bed, a greasy sheet covered her nakedness. Benway flashed on Morse, like the undertaker he so resembled, drawing the sheet over Nadja.
But his wife wasn’t dead.
Just dead drunk.
The room stank of puke and sex. An empty bottle of vodka and two smeared shot glasses on the bedside table told the story. A coiled condom—a slug trail of semen dribbling out onto the filthy carpet that sucked at the soles of Benway’s shoes—was the punch line.
Benway sniffed the air like a terrier, smelling his wife (Samsara, musk, her juices) mixed with the stink of an unwashed male.
“The man?” Benway asked.
“I got rid of him,” Morse said, unconsciously flexing his right hand and sending it behind his back, but not before Benway saw the abrasion on one knuckle, a small scab already forming.
The man would remember more than Nadja’s pale thighs when he reminisced on this night.
“Who was he?”
“Just a drunk.” Morse sucked his teeth.
Benway sighed as he looked down at his wife. She’d wanted to punish herself tonight, to take herself to a low and dirty place.
“I called the facility,” Morse said. “They’ll be here shortly.”
A very discreet and very expensive detox clinic in leafy Maryland. They knew Nadja well.
“How did you find her?”
“A beat cop saw her coming in here. He recognized her from the DUI a few years back and called me.”
“Did you compensate him?”
“It’s taken care of, sir.”
“Thank you, Morse.” Benway caught a glimpse of his lined face in the peeling mirror and looked away.
The tall man stood even straighter.
“Sir, the other business.”
“Yes?”
“Kate Swift made contact with Danvers in Berlin and then caught a train to Hamburg.”
“And?”
“She killed our man on the train.”
Benway winced and squeezed his temples between thumb and forefinger. “His orders were to watch her? Nothing more?”
“Exactly, but he clearly underestimated her.”
“Yes, I made that mistake myself.” He sighed and busied himself with lighting a cigarette, the Ronson clicking and flaring. “Any idea of her destination?”
“No. I’m checking all the flights out of Hamburg.”
“Go. Make that your priority. I’ll take this from here.”
Morse nodded and left the room, closing the door quietly.
Benway stood over the bed, smoking, and as he studied his insensible wife’s face he saw the girl he’d rescued from the rubble of Sarajevo twenty years before. She’d come so far and yet she hadn’t moved at all.
FIFTEEN
Maybe it was jetlag, sleep deprivation or stress but as Kate stepped from the air-conditioned taxi into the molten heat thick with gasoline fumes she was no longer in Bangkok—she was back in Lahore, two years ago and it wasn’t Suzie’s hand she clutched, it was Yusuf’s, his blood hot and sticky as it spilled down the sleeve of his kameez onto her fingers.
She’d rushed him from a car, the driver already accelerating away, across a sidewalk of street vendors into an alley, setting him down on the filthy asphalt, Yusuf reaching up and shifting the scarf she wore over her hair, touching her face, smiling at her through his beard, his white teeth flashing, saying to her, “I’m okay, Katie. I’m okay. It’s just a flesh wound.”
And it was.
That day he’d been lucky. So had she. The car bomb on the Empress Road that had left scores dead had flung them to the ground, but only Yusuf had been slightly injured, taking a twist of metal in the upper arm, the driver of their car shouting, hustling them back into the Toyota SUV and speeding off.
Kate should have forced Yusuf to drive with her to the airport, should never have left Pakistan without him.
But he’d insisted that the bombing was a coincidence. That he still needed to rendezvous with the man who would take him to his erstwhile assets in South Waziristan. That the lives of two families depended on it.
Looking at his face, thinking of their daughter back home, in the care of Yusuf’s parents, had caused her to nod and drive alone to the airport.
She had never seen her husband alive again.
“Mommy! Mommy?”
Suzie, tugging at her sleeve, brought her back into Bangkok, the air thick with rotting trash, spiced food and the stench of the canals and the river.
She paid the taxi driver and took Suzie into a street market, a garish sprawl of clothing, electronic gadgets, Buddhist trinkets, deaf people selling Viagra and imitation Patek watches, and strange food cooked in the open on woks, the fragrant smoke clinging to their clothes and hair. Kate, even though she’d shed her coat and boots, sweated under her winter clothes.
She shopped quickly, knowing that the press of people around her and Suzie hid them but would also obscure anyone tailing them.
She bought boys’ T-shirts and shorts for Suzie, despite her daughter’s protests and her beeline for the stalls selling knock-off Roxy beachwear for girls. She bought them both flip-flops. She bought lightweight shirts for herself and linen drawstring pants.
Walking in search of a taxi they came upon a looming hotel with a doorman dressed like an extra from The King and I. He ushered them into the cool interior with its soothing rattan décor and she took the child into the bathroom and they changed into their tropical gear.
Suzie, in her T-shirt, boardshorts and cap, looked even more like a boy. A miserable boy.
Kate looked like just another pallid Westerner in Thailand for the sun.
She left the suitcase containing their winter clothes in the bathroom and, toting the bags filled with the beach gear, led Suzie across the lobby into the street, where she flagged down a taxi to take them back to Suvarnabhumi Airport, to get their flight to the south and Harry Hook.
SIXTEEN
“Nadja? Nadja, can you hear me?” Michael asked.
But when Nadja Benway opened her eyes and her pupils slowly adjusted to the light and found focus on the face hovering near hers it wasn’t her dead lover’s, it was her wrinkled husband’s, and she felt a dread so profound that she could do nothing but shut them again.
After what felt like hours she allowed her right eyelid to lift just a fraction.
Lucien was still there and—in his typically flagrant disregard of other peoples’ rules—drew on a cigarette, exhaling smoke through flared nostrils.
“Welcome back.” Lucien smiled at her. “You’re in the clinic. You’ve experienced some kind of a . . . breakdown.”
“You did it, didn’t you?”
“Did what?”
“Killed Michael?”
Lucien shook his head. “I don’t know any Michael.”
“Liar!”
Nadja lunged forward, wanting to tear out his deceitful tongue, but she couldn’t move her arms and legs.
Tilting her head, a task almost beyond her, Nadja saw her limbs were harnessed to the metal bed frame by cloth straps.
She screamed and Lucien smiled down at her complacently.
A white-clad figure hurried in and fiddled with the drip dangling over her and the room, and Lucien with it, was consumed by a spiral of darkness.
SEVENTEEN
Hook awoke to the grind of an engine struggling up to his house. Unwashed, fogged, shaking, he dragged himself from his bed and when he crept to the window he saw it was nearly sunset, the lurid sky too bright for his torn eyes.
He snagged his tortoiseshell Wayfarers from the table and peered out the fly-screened window. When he spotted a little bile green van jolting up the track—whoever sat in the taxi’s covered flatbed getting shaken like shucked peas—he relaxed a little.
He knew the tuk-tuk. The Thai driver, Ton, did him the odd favor in exchange for cash.
The taxi clattered and gasped to a halt and threatened to roll back, before the emergency brake held.
Ton, small, dark and wiry, slid from behind the wheel as young blonde woman and a boy stepped down from the rear, flapping their hands at the cloud of red dust.
Hook pulled on a befouled T-shirt and stood at the top of the steps.
“Sawadee kap, Harry.”
“Saweede kap, Ton.”
“Sabaidee mai?”
“I’m good, Ton. Who are you bringing here?”
Before he could answer, the driver’s cell phone rang and he started a loud conversation in Thai. The kid stayed at the taxi and the woman headed toward the stairs.
Hook held up a hand like a cigar store Indian. “Whoa, lady, I think you’re lost.”
“Can I come up?”
“What for?”
“I need your help.”
“I’m not in the tourist business.”
“I know that. It’s you I’m here to see.”
“Clearly you’re confusing me with somebody else.”
She shook her pale head and his old spy’s eyes saw the fingers of black creeping in at the roots. “No, you’re Harry Hook,” she said.
When she spoke his real name Hook lurched down the steps, his head throbbing.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“My name’s Kate Swift.”
It took a while for the dots, weighed down by days of drinking, to creep toward each other and mate but when they did he gaped.
“Yes,” she said, “the traitor.”
“I was going to say whistleblower.”
“I’m not a soccer referee.” She tried a smile but her tense jaw muscles made it more of a grimace.
“What are you doing here?” Hook asked.
“As I said, I need your help.”
“How did you find me?”
“Mrs. Danvers.”
“Christ, he must be getting soft in his declining years.”
“Or compassionate.” When Hook snorted she said, “You know what’s happened? With me?”
“Hell yes. Two years ago you got on everybody’s shit list.”
“No, not two years ago. Two days ago.”
He shook his head. “No. Why would I know that?”
“It’s been all over the news.”
“I don’t get time to watch the news. I’ve been busy.”
Kate looked at his stubble and his soiled clothes and said, “Yeah, I can see that.” She moved a strand of hair from her face. “Two days ago my cover was blown and I’m on the run. We are. Me and my daughter.”
He looked over at the kid standing by the taxi, watching him from under a cap.
“I thought it was a boy.”
“That’s the idea. But she’s a girl.”
“And you came to me? Why?”
“I know your reputation. I know that you have a way of making things happen.”
“Had.”
“Huh?”
“Had. Past tense. Whoever I once was I am no longer.”
“Please.”
“No. I can’t help you. Now you get the hell out of here. Let the taxi take you to the airport. Pronto.”
“You’re turning us away?”
“Lady, I can’t even fix my own problems. I wouldn’t know where the hell to start with yours.” He called across to the driver. “Ton, get them to the airport, okay?”
Kate Swift looked like she was about to speak then her face closed and she turned and walked back to the taxi and took the kid’s hand and they climbed into the back.
Ton started the tuk-tuk, giving Hook one of those blank Buddhist looks that warn of bad luck ahead.
“Fuck you,” Hook said to the dust of the retreating taxi, “and the karma you rode in on.”
- - -
As they bumped back down the track, Kate leaned forward and spoke to the driver. “Is there still a flight out?”
“One last plane to Bangkok,” Ton said. “It leave seven o’ clock.”
“Take us, please.” She sat back.
“Was that him, Mommy?” Suzie said.
“Yes, that was him.”
“Then why are we going?”
“Because he’s just a story, baby.”
“A story?”
“Yeah, a story he made up a long time ago that your mommy was dumb enough to believe.”
She looked at the limestone cliffs that reared out of the dense green jungle, c
reased rocks glowing red in the late light. The stuff of postcards. Then the taxi slowed for ditch in the road and they crept past a pile of torn black trash bags, a stray dog feeding on the ripe garbage that rotted in the sun.
“Where are we going now?” Suzie asked.
“To get another plane.”
“Another plane where?”
“To someplace better, baby.”
EIGHTEEN
Hook sat staring at the liter of Cutty Sark that stood atop his elderly Sony Trinitron, the vibrations from the soundtrack of the subtitled Stallone action movie that was reaching its wild and bloody climax causing the golden liquid to undulate slightly in a way that was almost sexually seductive.
It was night, and the only light came from the TV, Hook seated before the tube dressed in a pair of shorts, his bare torso covered in a thin sheen of sweat.
A mosquito had breached the net on the window and whined around his head, Hook too entranced by the dance of the whiskey to do more than wag a limp hand in defense.
He wanted to drink.
Jesus, he needed to drink.
He knew that sleep would elude him unless he uncorked that bottle and swallowed its contents and let the amber liquid lead him into the arms of Mr. Sandman.
Why then was he resisting?
The answer to that question was the goad he needed and he sat forward on the cane chair, the damp flesh of his back separating from the woven rattan with an audible smooch, and reached across for the bottle.
His hand was arrested in mid-air.
The Stallone movie had given way to breaking news and he saw a live feed of the crash site of a passenger jet that had fallen en route to Bangkok—burning jungle, cops, soldiers and firefighters and hurtling emergency vehicles.
Hook couldn’t understand Thai—the complex tonal language beyond his grasp—but he knew exactly what he was seeing, and he sat rapt, his hands gripping his knees, watching the images of horror and devastation, the undulating Cutty Sark invisible to him now.
NINETEEN
The Truth Itself Page 6