“That was a bad day where nothing went right.”
“How about those unarmed bankers in London?” I asked. “Were you following orders or was it self-defense? Perhaps they were threatening you with negative interest.”
“None of those guys were innocent, brother,” Jarrod said. “You were there.”
“Let’s try this,” I said. “After all the things you’ve done, all the people you’ve killed, do you believe you’ll get into heaven or hell?”
“Not my call, brother. Like I said, let God sort it out.”
I despised Jarrod for his matter-of-fact attitude to killing. He took no pleasure in it. It was just a job. In some ways, I found that callousness worse.
I was amazed we managed to pass all the police checkpoints as we drove down from the hills and into the Valley. The trick was to stay within the speed limit. We gave them no probable cause to check the cars and see the crates in the back. The support provided by Benjamin from his hotel room in Venice certainly helped. True to his word, he accessed half a dozen prototype high-altitude drones that floated hundreds of feet over the city and provided us with intel on what streets to take all the way down from the hills, through Laurel Canyon, and down into the Valley. The route we ended up taking was so circuitous, the streets so crowded, that it took us two hours when a normal traffic day would have taken us half an hour at most.
“How did you end up in this mess anyway, brother?” Jarrod asked.
“Complete coincidence,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Julia continued to look out the window at the surreal chaos of the city, but she was listening to everything.
“You didn’t pick up the assignment ’cause you wanted the cash?”
“Not worth my while. Julia and I just stumbled into this whole thing.”
“And you volunteered?” Jarrod said, incredulous.
“Keith was out of his depth and freaking out. I felt sorry for him. I told him we’d take care of it,” I said.
“And bear in mind Ravi and I are completely inexperienced in dealing with guns and trained killers,” Julia said.
“You do realize this job is worth the upper six figures to us, right?” Ariel said.
“Actually, I didn’t,” I said.
Jarrod looked at me, not quite believing.
“Brother, you are either a calculating genius or one lucky son of a bitch.”
“I wouldn’t call stumbling onto you lot lucky,” I said.
“I have met people who are too stupid to live.” Jarrod shook his head in disbelief. “You are too lucky to die.”
“I told you, Jarrod,” Ariel said. “He is that good.”
“If he really was that good, he’d be working for our shop,” Jarrod said.
“He’s got gods on his side,” Ariel said. “You don’t need lucky when you have gods on your side.”
Jarrod grunted. Knowing he wasn’t going to win any argument with Ariel, he went back to conferring with Mikkelford and Reyes on the radio.
“You know you totally got under my boss’s skin?” Ariel said.
“I don’t know how I could possibly do that,” I said.
I still remembered my sister’s wedding night more than six months ago when Laird Collins showed up and tried to headhunt me for his private military company. We had words. We talked about our core beliefs. I saw just how insane he was and knew I didn’t want anything to do with him. He believed in the Apocalypse, Armageddon, and that everything he did with Interzone was pushing the world closer towards bringing about the Second Coming and the Rapture. He had a smooth charisma about him that made talking about all that apocalyptic bollocks sound like the most reasonable thing in the world. He was off his nut and he was a monster. His company did a lot of wetwork for the CIA and God knows how many black bag operations, of which this was just another on the list. He and his employees were all terrifying and a scourge on the world. It was bad enough that my job brought me in contact with the lot of them and made me complicit in the horrors they enacted. That was a karmic debt I was going to have to pay somewhere down the line.
“What did you say to him that night anyway?” Ariel asked.
“We said a lot of things,” I said. “I don’t even remember anymore. I had a lot on my mind.”
I wasn’t about to admit that I remembered exactly what I’d said, and that I was taking the piss.
“Well, when he got back to the States, he got obsessed with finding out what Morris dancing was. He even looked up videos on YouTube, and that only made him even more confused. He started to believe there was some hidden meaning when you brought up Morris dancing to him.”
“I barely even remember what I said.”
“He thought you had to have a deeper reason for mentioning it to him, like there was some kind of code embedded in it.”
“Oh, come on.”
“He said there is no way a village dance that looks that dumb could possibly exist except for some secret it was conveying, especially if it’s as old as it is.”
“It’s just a vaguely Old English pagan dance ritual for the harvest and fertility and all that stuff,” I said, reeling.
“Uh-huh. He said you wouldn’t come clean and explain. He thinks you were cluing him in on another secret, a counter-narrative to the world. Mr. Collins is all about researching all the narratives that counter the one he believes in. You drove him nuts.”
“As if he wasn’t nuts enough already,” I muttered. “It’s bad enough he believes he’s doing his part to bring about Armageddon, the Second Coming, and the Rapture. How can you go along with that?”
“It’s a job,” Ariel said breezily.
“Haven’t you thought about the implications of what you do, Ariel? All the people you killed, all the bastards you propped up, the system you reinforced? Have you ever thought what it might be doing to the world or the cost to your soul?”
“Sure,” Ariel said. “I read up on history. I read about wars and power and empires and their ends. And you know what? It’s all the same. It’s always been the same. Men in power doing shit using fodder like us to make their ends. And in the end, they all fail, and they all die. The world goes on. And we get a ringside seat to the show.”
“That’s what this is to you?” I said. “A game?”
“It’s a job. With a good paycheck. Man, you’re looking at me like I’m some kind of monster. That’s cool. According to my psych profile, I’m wired in a certain way that makes it easy for me to do this job without the trauma or PTSD that might come with it.”
“You mean you don’t have a conscience?” Julia asked.
“Pretty much. And at the same time, I have the intellectual capacity for higher thinking, and a curiosity about spirituality, that maybe there’s something bigger and higher than we are, but not necessarily God.”
“I thought your whole bit about going to India and seeking wisdom was an act.”
“Ravi, I keep telling you, it’s for real. I’m into it. That’s why you’re so interesting to me. You’re so hung up on doing the right thing and karma, it’s kind of funny to me.”
“I’m glad to be a source of amusement to you.”
“Come on, you know it’s more than that. We have a connection.”
I glanced at Julia, who didn’t react. The amused smile on her face didn’t waver, but her eyes were cold.
“So here we are,” Ariel said. “In this crazy little caper where you’re shitting yourself and you need our help. That’s the way things go. That’s how we stay in each other’s orbit. We meet the people we’re supposed to meet in this life. I think that’s hilarious.”
Julia laughed, too.
I didn’t.
TWENTY-ONE
From Olivia’s recordings:
“The book Derek published was a roman à clef, names changed but the vices and habits of the Chinese elite characters were apparently all true. Tales of taking bribes, lavish dinners at top restaura
nts, excessive spending at designer shops in Central, spending on mistresses, visiting prostitutes—the usual salacious stuff you found in any tabloids you could buy off the street. That was what drew the attention of the authorities on the Mainland. Did Derek even know who the book was about? Were they sweating him to find out the name of the writer? I hadn’t heard any news about a writer or journalist who had disappeared from the streets of Hong Kong. My guess is, Derek wrote the book himself. He would probably have confessed that to his interrogators by now. It wouldn’t surprise me if his wife helped him with it, but he would probably have taken all the blame to protect her, or they threatened to arrest Marie as well to make him take the fall.
“It occurred to me that Derek’s interrogators might have wanted him to give up his sources for the book. The anti-corruption drive was continuing apace in China, and poor, hapless Derek might be a pawn in this game of cat and mouse between the corrupt and the inquisition. Given that he seemed to think he was publishing a larky, snarky commentary on the spending habits of Mainland Chinese officials once they’re let loose in Hong Kong, he might have been asking for trouble, but not everyone is as paranoid as I am, and in this day and age, I don’t believe you can ever be paranoid enough.
“But a book that didn’t name names was not good evidence in a trial. Gossip was just hearsay. Without names and actual documentation, its contents were not actionable if a prosecutor wanted to crack down on corrupt officials. I had to think of Derek’s disappearance as part of a larger game being played. Derek was just a small part of it, and I had to find a way to put an end to that part so he could be sent back home.
“Time to use the wives’ emails.
“I bought a cheap new laptop on which I could create entirely new accounts that weren’t connected to my usual accounts. I phoned Ravi while he was in Los Angeles and asked him to upload some programs I had planted on his office laptop to a server I’d set up so I could download them to this laptop so none of it could be traced to me or Golden Sentinels. I couldn’t risk having those programs on a computer I might have brought with me when I flew into town. Best to start clean. I will probably have to destroy this new laptop before I leave, to erase any traces of what I get up to here.
“It didn’t take long for me to hack into the wives’ emails. I got a good map of what online websites they shopped at, sussed out their favorite brands and shops. I used the programs Ravi uploaded for me to create discount coupon images from their favorite online shops, offering huge savings on their favorite brands, and embedded the coupons into emails made to look like they were from the shops. Their sense of Internet security was a bit lax, and I knew they couldn’t resist clicking on a discount coupon for designer brands. That downloaded the payload into their computers, which enabled me to root around them.
“Within an hour of my sending out the emails, I could see that the wives had clicked on the coupons, which downloaded my keyloggers into their computers.
“Twenty minutes after that, I had full access to their computers. From there I had the passwords to their bank accounts and I could look at their balances and transactions. I tracked when large sums of money were transferred into their accounts, which were then spent on buying luxury and designer goods. I could see their accounts on the Chinese retail sites they used. Some of these sites were well dodgy, and I got the wives’ order histories. Designer bags, shoes, watches, jewelry—all stolen goods, no imitations, only the real thing for these ladies. All costing more than a government official could afford. Time to do some cross-referencing. I’m going to need a spreadsheet.
“Brother Bull just texted on ChattyMe, offering me and mine a good deal on upmarket seafood like rock lobsters and shark fin from Australia, said he would make sure it was the real thing, not the cheap forgeries or rubbish. Hm.”
TWENTY-TWO
We arrived at last at the safe house, an unassuming white condominium on Vineland near Hatteras. It was obviously picked for its anonymous, completely unexceptional appearance. Far be it for me to judge whether this was the best spot to have a safe house in. Jarrod mentioned that it was because this situation was an emergency, so they had to use this condo on short notice. It just happened to be a property Interzone owned. It was mainly for housing its operatives when they were in town on a job. Marcie had told me that the CIA and various agencies kept safe houses all over Los Angeles. I wondered how they could avoid a scrum where different spies, agents, and their marks would run into one another all the time, but Los Angeles was big and scattered enough for it not to be an issue, I suppose.
“We can stay in the blind spots,” Ariel said. “As long as we stay in the car, the street cameras won’t catch our faces.”
The windows were tinted so no one could see inside. The license plate was a dummy number that would come up clean on a police computer. Ariel drove us into the garage and shut the door with the remote. We got out and went through the door into the living room.
“It’s going to be a little crowded, but we’re just going to spend the night, then leave when the fires die down and traffic’s back to normal,” Jarrod said.
It was a cheap, nondescript house that a low-income family might live in. White walls, with no effort to decorate to give it a human touch or personality. No posters or photos, no plants—nothing to indicate humans actually stayed here. This was the type of house that drug dealers might use to stash their gear. In this case, it was a private military contractor keeping weapons and communications equipment.
“Entry and exit points aren’t the best,” Ariel said. “At least we have access to the freeways.”
The walls of the living room were lined with boxes of spare ammo and guns. A cheap IKEA dinner table was the parking spot for a radio system, laptop, and modem. Two Rakshasas—I mean, Interzone men—sat on the sofa watching the Home Shopping Channel. They wore shoulder holsters and drank canned soup as the TV was selling special teeth-whitening products.
“Williams, DuBois,” Jarrod called as we entered.
“Yo, Sarge,” Williams called and waved. “You get the package?”
“Secured in the garage,” Jarrod said.
The two men on the sofa locked eyes with me.
“This is the guy?” DuBois said.
“The very same,” Ariel said.
“Damn,” Williams said. “Never thought I’d meet a bona fide shaman.”
“Sorry?” I said.
Julia looked at me.
Williams and DuBois got off the sofa and shook my hand.
“The man who talked to gods,” DuBois said. “My family in Haiti told me about guys like you all my life.”
“Er, right,” I said. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“The Colonel said you were part of God’s plan, even if he hasn’t figured out how yet,” DuBois said.
“Don’t bet on it,” I said.
“How’s your package?” Jarrod asked.
“Five by five,” DuBois said.
“He’s in the bedroom,” Williams said. “Finally stopped talking after you guys took off.”
“I get the feeling he might be in shock,” DuBois said.
“He’s either chatty or shut down,” Williams said. “No in-between for him.”
“Well, you can’t blame him,” Ariel said. “Most guys who are targeted for assassination for the first time go into shock.”
“Who is this, anyway?” I asked.
“Name’s Hamid Mahfouz. Heard of him?” Jarrod said.
“Can’t say I have.”
“You’ve heard of his late father, Abir Mahfouz.”
“The dictator?”
“Daddy Abir was a US ally,” Ariel said. “His country has a ton of oil. Since he was killed, the country’s been in a state of civil war, so the CIA has decided that another Mahfouz needs to take power to bring the country under control.”
“So what’s Hamid doing here in Los Angeles?” I asked.
“He’s lived here for over ten years,” Ariel said.
“Owns a couple of restaurants, runs a production company that makes one of the top-rated kids’ variety shows on TV.”
“He was third in line for the throne,” Jarrod said. “But his two brothers were killed along with their dad, so Hamid is going to have to go home to take up the reins and bring stability back to the country.”
“Hang on,” Julia said. “If Abir Mahfouz was overthrown in a people’s uprising, why would they accept his son?”
“Because the country’s in chaos and terrorists are threatening to set up shop there,” Jarrod said. “The people would rather have the old regime back to keep everything stable over a bunch of Jihadis who set bombs and want to wage war on the West.”
Then something occurred to me.
“Does Hamid know Gossamer Rand Ross?” I asked.
“They’re drinking buddies,” Jarrod said. “They hang out at the same country club, the same three-star restaurants, charity events.”
“So those damn guns we were carting around,” I said. “Ross wasn’t holding them for Hamid, was he? As a favor for both Hamid and the CIA?”
“You got it,” Jarrod said.
“And there are assassins here to get Hamid, which accelerated the timetable for getting him out of the country and back home? They were part of the group that came to Ross’s house earlier?” I continued. “And the guns are a gift, aren’t they? For Hamid to present to the national army courtesy of the US in their fight against the Jihadists?”
“Did you just put this together without a prior briefing, man?” Reyes asked.
“I told you he was good,” Ariel said.
Behind me, the gods gathered in the living room and watched for my reaction. This was where I’d ended up yet again. I thought I was avoiding chaos and weirdness on this busman’s holiday in Los Angeles, only to end up where I always had since I began working for Golden Sentinels. Julia and I were off the books, yet here was another labyrinthine, fucked up case where we were in over our heads and teetering on the edge of total disaster and possibly death. A-bloody-gain. Julia and I had no other choice except to stick with these maniacs from Interzone and the guns till the end. We were trapped by a literal ring of fire with looters and Immigration cops knocking on doors. How much more apocalyptic was this going to get?
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