Kyle’s about to mumble I’m not Robinson but changes his mind.
“Say something?”
Kyle shakes his head no, focuses. There’re three guys in here. Three he can make out.
“We both know what we’re capable of doing to you. But, see, we don’t have time to be so gentle. We don’t have months to rebuild you. Don’t have time for sensory deprivation and hydrotherapy and electric behavior modification and hypnosis.” Date Rapist smiles, and his teeth are white bricks against the strobes. “We don’t have time to break you and make you love us at the same time. Your specialty.”
“Please,” Kyle says. “Please. I’m not him. I’m not. I swear. I’m Kyle West. I’m Kyle West.”
“Then why do you have Robinson’s passport? Why do you have his credit cards? Why are you wearing his clothes?”
Kyle looks for a break. “I can explain…I can…Just give me…”
“I know you. I know who you are. I know your face.”
“Robinson. You’re among people who know you,” another guy says.
The third guy laughs. “So just tell us who your fucking target is.”
Kyle asks, “What target? Who? Listen, I’m Kyle West…”
“Why won’t you just let us make this quick?”
“Quick…make what quick?”
“Tell us what you’re doing here, and you won’t feel a thing.”
The other voice. “Tell us who hired you.”
And then the third. “Who hired you?”
Kyle stumbles. “I don’t know…I don’t…”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I don’t…I don’t know…”
“Why are you making this harder?”
“I’m not, I swear. I can’t tell you anything. I don’t know anything you want.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I want to,” Kyle pleads. “I do. I want to talk to you.”
“Then do it. Let go.”
“But I don’t know anything. I swear it. I swear,” Kyle sputters, starting to tear up. “I swear.”
“All right.” Date Rapist rises to his feet. “This has to move forward.”
26.
One of the guys kills the strobes. Kyle tries to readjust his vision; tears sluice down his face.
Someone comes over and rests a laptop on Kyle’s thighs.
Date Rapist talks again. “See, Robinson, I know something no one else does. You told it to me once. Years back. Right before you did this exact thing to someone else. I’d been sent there to learn from you.” Those white teeth again. “I know that whatever we do to you, you won’t care. The more pain we give you, the more spite you’ll feel…the more you’ll make us suffer. The more you’ll hold out. ’Cause in your case, you live for anger. And if we show you any mercy, you’ll hate us for it. And we don’t have time to play that game.”
And Kyle thinks, Thank Christ for small favors. They’re not going to torture me.
“So we had a special friend follow Lara from the airport. This is a friend you know. You know his work well.”
“Lara…”
“Yeah,” Date Rapist goes on. “And you’re going to watch while he tears her apart. You’re going to watch her suffer. And, more to the point, you’ll suffer. Because I know the thing that scares you most. I know her body is your body, because you love her. And I’m going to make you watch him destroy it.”
“I’ll tell you. I will,” Kyle pleads. He doesn’t want to watch this. “Please…let me help you.”
“Too late,” Date Rapist says. “She’s gonna have to hurt a little, ’cause you made me wait.” He punches Kyle hard in the mouth. “You shouldn’t have made me wait.” He powers up the laptop. “We told our special friend to make sure he’s got the camera aimed right at her face.”
Date Rapist goes to a secure site, passes through four stages of encryption. The screen fills up with the interior of a hotel room.
The bedroom.
Date Rapist turns to Kyle. “Can you see?”
“Please…whatever you’re doing, don’t. Don’t,” Kyle pleads.
“Can you see?”
Kyle nods. He can see.
Date Rapist uses the cursor to scroll around the room.
The lamp is shattered, green glass against the white carpet. There’s a torn pair of black lace panties balled up beside the bed.
He keeps scrolling, and there’s a pool of blood and a broken champagne bottle.
One of the kidnappers says: “Looks like our friend couldn’t wait to get started. Problem with a man who loves his work.”
The other one laughs. “Think he fucked her up, boss.”
Date Rapist doesn’t talk, just keeps scrolling.
He leaves the bedroom, makes his way to the bathroom. The shower’s running.
There’s more fresh blood en route.
Kyle’s nauseous, swallows back fear. “No. Turn it off. Please, turn it off.”
Date Rapist doesn’t look at Kyle, just says, “Should’ve talked sooner.”
“Please, turn it off.…Turn it off.”
The camera’s getting closer to the shower. More blood, and a woman’s blouse in tatters. Date Rapist is getting pissed off. Seems like his friend got too enthusiastic too early.
He zooms in on the shower, and his face starts to turn ashen.
He scrolls around faster and faster. Something’s not right.
The shower curtain is open. Bloody handprints are smeared all over the sink and medicine cabinet.
The shower stall is in full view.
And before Kyle can figure out what’s going on, Date Rapist rises in a rage, yanks his phone out of his pocket, and finger-pounds the keypad.
“What happened?” someone says.
Date Rapist fumes. “Shut the fuck up.”
Kyle looks down to the screen. It’s not a woman in the shower, not anyone who could conceivably be named Lara.
It’s a man.
He’s Chinese and bearded and muscle-bound, and his throat has been sliced so deeply that his head is attached to his neck by only a wing and a prayer and a bit of cracked bone and cartilage.
Date Rapist throws his phone against the wall. “Fucking bitch.”
The two guys run over. “What the fuck? What happened?”
Date Rapist storms over and kicks Kyle in the head, then turns to his boys and says: “Fucking cunt killed him. Tore his throat out.”
Both of the guys say in unison, “She killed him?”
Kyle reels, spits blood and part of a tooth, and throws up a little in shock.
Date Rapist barks to one of the two, “You. Get him ready to move. This place is blown. You”—he points to the other one—“get on the phone and call for backup. Who knows what our friend told her before she killed him.”
The hood goes over Kyle’s head again. He listens to someone scream muffled orders into a cell phone.
Darkness. Complete as the day before Creation.
Kyle squirms in his seat.
Seconds later, he feels the moisture of lips against his ear and then hears the words “Don’t worry, baby. It’s me.” A woman’s voice, deep; the accent sounds Russian, but from the outer provinces, nowhere near Moscow. Kyle can’t help hoping he lives long enough to see what kind of body contains a voice like that.
Then the bullets start, a saturnalia of shells.
Kyle hears his kidnappers suffer, hears them slam into the wall, fall directly to the floor. Someone heaves like he’s breaking open inside. Guttural gagging, murmurs without the strength to become a scream, limbs fluttering against linoleum. Kyle feels fluid collecting around his feet.
His savior scampers to the other side of the warehouse. She flips on the lights.
He swivels his head. Back and forth. Back and forth. He can pick up sense impressions, can feel movement.
He hears his savior’s footsteps get closer and closer, and then he recoils, feels the cold of a blade against his skin, tries to bounce away on the bolted cha
ir.
“Stay still, baby,” she says.
Kyle’s words are muffled. “What are you doing? What are you—”
She saws away at the cords on his hands and feet, frees him.
“We gotta go,” she says, taking his hand, and they rocket down several flights of steps.
27.
She throws Kyle into the passenger seat of a two-door rental pockmarked with rust, a wounded warrior’s chassis. There’s nothing she can do to this car that it hasn’t been through already.
She starts the car, waits until the engine’s epic sputter turns into a sustained surge, then slams down on the gas.
She gropes around the dash, then reaches under the seat, grabs a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, hands them to Kyle. “Light one for me,” she says, and then laughs, realizing she left the hood on him. “I’m sorry, baby,” she says. “Things happened so fast.”
She takes off Kyle’s hood, grabs the nape of his neck and pulls him close, her nails gripping his jaw, and plants a long, ravenous kiss on his mouth—all the while steering with one hand. Right as she’s slipping Kyle her tongue, she breaks away and throws him off, smack into the door handle.
Kyle winces.
“Who the fuck are you?” she yells.
Kyle’s frozen by nerves and the passion of her kiss. No one has ever kissed him like that before.
She pulls a gun from her waistband and points it at Kyle. “Answer me. Who are you?”
He throws his hands up, shrinks into the corner. “Don’t kill me. Christ. Don’t kill me.”
“Who are you?”
“Kyle. My name’s Kyle.”
“Kyle…Kyle what?”
Kyle’s blinded by how fast the car’s moving; his stomach’s doing laps. She’s blazing past throngs of Buddhists off to pray; past tourists snapping photos of temples and markets; past hands pounding on the car windows, hawking DVDs, fruit, and water; past lines of men and women turning the highway into a sidewalk; past banyan trees baking in the sun.
She waves the gun. “Kyle what?”
“You killed those guys. You killed all of them.”
“Want to be next? Talk.”
“Fuck…don’t kill me. Don’t.”
“Where’s Robinson? Why do those guys think you’re Robinson?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where he is.”
She’s screams at him as she floors the gas. “How do you know Robinson? How the fuck do you know him?”
“I don’t know him. I met him. But I don’t know him.”
“How’d you meet?”
Kyle’s reeling, can’t keep up with her questions. “What?”
“Tell me where he is.”
“I don’t know. I swear it. I don’t know where he is.”
“Who do you work for?”
“No one. I don’t work for anyone.”
“Bullshit. Everyone works for someone.”
“I don’t. I don’t.”
She tightens her finger on the trigger. “Who do you work for?”
Kyle screams back at her, “No one. I don’t know anything. I swear. Listen to me.”
She looks in the rearview. There’s an SUV with tinted windows trailing them, and closing the gap. She’s got the gas floored. The car’s doing ninety and leaving behind an ocean of oil and brake fluid. The speed is cannibalizing the carburetor; the transmission whistles like air through a bullet hole; the body of the car is shaking.
They don’t have much time before the SUV catches up.
“Goddamn, Robinson,” she says. “Why’d you have to send me to a place with no roads or sidewalks?”
Kyle’s beached in the corner, rubbing his wrists, which are raw and swollen from the cord. His eyes are empty; he’s staring off. “I don’t know anything,” he whispers to the girl he figures has to be Lara. “I don’t.” He’s marooned inside himself.
She checks the rearview again. The car on their ass doesn’t have a license plate. Not a good sign.
Kyle stares at the ornate tattoos on Lara’s upper arm and shoulder. Can’t figure out what language they’re in, thinks it could be Slavic.
In a slightly softer voice, but while pressing the gun right against his forehead, Lara asks: “One last time…who the fuck are you?”
“Kyle West.” He nods in affirmation, almost to reassure himself. “I’m Kyle West.”
She presses the gun harder, leaving a mark. “That’s your name. Not who you are.”
Two bullets obliterate the back window before Kyle gets a chance to respond.
28.
Kyle throws himself against the door in shock, thinking the bullets came from Lara’s gun. He’s sure he’s shot, searches his body for blood and wounds.
More bullets fly through the car’s exposed back; they lodge in the upholstery and frame, shredding leather and throwing tufts of fabric.
Lara loses control of the car. Smoke overflows from the engine in a furious froth, obscuring her vision. She slams on the brakes, then pumps them, but the car keeps spinning until it ends up in a dead stop facing the wrong way—which is to say, directly at the SUV.
Lara tosses her hair off her forehead, breathes in, and picks up her gun from the floor.
On impulse, Kyle decides to seize the chance to flee. Throws open the passenger door and takes off running across the road.
Lara sticks her head out the window. “Where the fuck are you going?”
But he doesn’t look back, doesn’t answer. He’s running to freedom or, at the very least, away from the crazy bitch who pointed a gun at his head.
Lara slams the car into reverse and floors it while unloading a fresh clip in the direction of the SUV.
Kyle crosses the road, streaks through dirt clumps and gravel that are surrounded on all sides by slum housing in a state of semicollapse. He’s running hard, sucking in air, holding his sides since he’s still in pain from his earlier beating. The shoes, Robinson’s Ferragamos, are tearing up his soles and ankles.
Just keep moving. Do not stop to think.
Kyle looks back and sees the doors of the SUV open. Two Chinese guys wearing wired-up earpieces surge out in pursuit. One of them yells: “Robinson. Stop. Get in the car!”
Kyle picks up his pace, his chest and throat burning, then makes a right into the slum suburb and immediately regrets it. This place makes the shanties of Phnom Penh look like something out of a brochure begging for a wide vista shot.
He strips off the Ferragamos so he can move faster. Not a great idea, considering he’s about to step in raw sewage.
He hops over a lake of indigo goo, something septic, and rips through an endless succession of clotheslines, strung up to both dry rags and separate makeshift housing.
No one he encounters pays much attention to this heavy-breathing American. They all seem to have other things on their minds—probably how happy they are he’s not a government-sponsored bulldozer razing their homes, gobbling up the land, and displacing them even farther from the city.
He cuts into a corridor separating residences, pushes aside some naked children, and is about to fuck up a game of dice some locals are playing when bullets explode a few inches from his head. In response, the gamblers pick up their dice, avoid eye contact, and disappear into the shanty labyrinth.
“Robinson,” one of his pursuers yells. “Robinson. We need to talk to you.”
Kyle keeps running, sees a clearing ahead, sees a street. He thinks he can make it.
The bullets are tearing up dirt in clumps around his feet.
“Stop,” one of his pursuers says. “Goddamn it. Stay put.”
Kyle does the exact opposite, makes a lung-shredding dash straight into the open road without looking—and is nearly crushed by Lara’s car, which is smoking like a nineteenth-century steam engine.
“Get in the fucking car,” she yells to Kyle.
He turns back and sees the two guys screaming into their headsets, their guns fixed on him, a few hundred feet behind.
&nb
sp; Kyle closes his eyes, prays for insight in the dark.
These people are going to kill me, he thinks. This woman might kill me.
“Get in here now,” she says.
Okay. Play the odds.
He rips open the car door and jumps inside.
Lara floors it, and the radiator responds by belching fluid across the windshield.
29.
PHNOM PENH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Fowler stands amid the crowds in the bustling airport. Just as he’d feared, he spent the past half hour on the phone with the police demanding a translator be sent over.
“Why wasn’t one here in the first place?” Fowler asks.
Fowler’s got the chief of police on the other end of the line, a man who’s trying to placate him but who has a long memory of colonialism that he can’t quite keep out of his voice. “Mr. Fowler, sir, the manager of the airport speaks English. Mr. Suong, I believe.”
Fowler paces around a boarding gate. “Yeah, well. Apparently, Mr. Suong has left for the afternoon.”
“Our translator will be back in the office at seven thirty tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll have shot someone by then.”
“I understand your frustration.”
“You seem to speak English pretty well.”
“Thank you, sir. Not much choice in the matter.”
“How about you come down here? Help me out.”
“Looking into missing persons isn’t what I do, Mr. Fowler.”
“It’s a crime, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re police, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you do, then?”
“Major crimes, sir. I report directly to Hun Sen’s chief of security. Our translator will happily accompany you to the airport at seven thirty tomorrow morning.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to remind you who I am.”
“I could say the same to you, Mr. Fowler. People like you come and go, but I live here. Good day.”
Fowler strolls over to the customer-service area and sits in front of Mai’s desk, holding her police report.
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