Weaponized

by Nicholas Mennuti

Fowler takes more notes. “Did he mention to them where he was from?”

  Pang asks; the girls answer. “No. They think he was either an American who spent a long time abroad or a European who worked in America. There was something about the way he talked…they couldn’t place it.”

  Fowler puts down the pen. “Were the girls scared of him?”

  “No. They liked him,” Pang says. “They said he wasn’t like most tourists or politicians here. He was actually having fun. He was interested in pleasure. They hope he comes back soon.”

  Fowler smiles, nods to the girls, and uses the only Khmer he knows. Thank you so much, he tells them. You have been most helpful.

  51.

  The two girls leave the room in a cloud of body glitter and the smell of stale champagne.

  Fowler watches them go, then turns to Pang. “All right. On your feet. You’re coming to jail.”

  “You’re arresting me?”

  Fowler nods several times in quick succession. “You bet.”

  “Mr. Fowler. Why must we keep doing this? You know I won’t be in jail for more than ten minutes before someone lets me out.”

  “One: I don’t think so. You shot at a CIA agent. Even Hun Sen might agree you need to do a little time for that. And two: If they do let you out in ten minutes, I’ll just follow you day and night until you do something else I can pick you up for. Even if you only stay in jail for ten minutes, it’ll sure make me feel better. Besides, I’m really not that busy. I’ve got time to make your life hell.”

  Pang seems entirely shocked. “Did I really upset you this much, Mr. Fowler?”

  “You shot at me, Pang.”

  “But I fully intended to miss.”

  Fowler motions him up with his hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Really?”

  “What part of ‘I’m incredibly pissed off at you’ don’t you fucking get?”

  “I see,” Pang says. “I see.”

  “Glad we agree. Now up.”

  Pang stands. “Mr. Fowler, I could be of considerably more help to you.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Don’t be coy. Of course you are.”

  Fowler knows this game, knows he has to play it carefully. Pang’s played it longer and better. Fowler knows from experience this is the moment all interrogations work toward, the moment when you and your prey have to take a leap of faith together and believe in each other.

  It’s like falling in love with attached electrodes.

  “If I tell you what I know, then we forget this whole situation.”

  “Depends on how good it is,” Fowler says.

  “It’s very good,” Pang says.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “You must promise if I talk, you won’t arrest me.”

  “You shot at me.”

  “Mr. Fowler. Do you think I would have shot at you if I didn’t have a backup plan in case it didn’t work? I’m no fool. I don’t go around shooting at the CIA. I’d have preferred not to talk to you, but if I had to, I knew I could get you to forget a few friendly shots.”

  Checkmate, Fowler thinks. “All right,” Fowler says. “I’ll bite. God knows I’ll probably get another crack at you soon enough.”

  “You say you are hunting Robinson,” Pang says. “However, the man in the picture you showed me…that man is not Robinson.”

  Fowler sits down. “Okay…”

  Pang sits down too. Things are cordial again. “I lied to you. I did meet Robinson when he came in here.”

  Fowler pulls out a cigarette, doesn’t bother hiding his sarcasm behind a plume of smoke, “Shocking, Pang. Shocking.”

  Pang ignores him. “However, I have also met the man in that picture, and they are two completely different people.”

  “Pang, if you are fucking with me, I swear…”

  “The man in your picture is not the man who was in my casino two days ago. The man you’re calling Robinson I met six months ago. He said his name was Andrew. I assume it’s an alias, but Andrew is what he called himself when he came in here.”

  “What’d you meet Andrew about?”

  “Documents. He wanted documents.”

  “And…”

  “I told him I didn’t deal in them.”

  “Okay,” Fowler says. “But you referred him somewhere, right?”

  “No. Andrew said I’d been recommended highly—”

  “He mention who recommended you?”

  “No,” Pang says. “Can I finish?”

  Fowler holds up his hands, a half-assed apology. “Go ’head.”

  “He said I’d been recommended highly and he’d wait to see if I could come up with something.”

  “And you didn’t come up with something?”

  “No.”

  “Did Andrew leave you a way to contact him in case you were able to come up with something?”

  “He doesn’t use phones,” Pang says. “He left me an address where I could get a message to him.”

  “Okay,” Fowler says. “And you’re gonna give that to me, right?”

  “Of course.” Pang starts to scroll through his BlackBerry.

  “Is that normal procedure? People not leaving numbers?”

  “Yes,” Pang says. “People change numbers here daily. Nothing about the address option struck me as odd.”

  “What was your impression of Andrew?”

  Pang keeps working through his endless list of contacts. “Friendly enough. He definitely didn’t want to hang around and talk. Had no interest in the girls, unlike our other friend.”

  “And the other Robinson, the one who came into your casino, how much time you spend with him?”

  “Very little. He was on a streak. I came out to offer him drinks on the house.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Lovely. A man very comfortable with his desires,” Pang says. “You know how it is, Mr. Fowler. If someone’s up, you keep him around as long as it takes to get the money back. No house wants to part with that amount in cash.” Pang pulls out a sheet of monogrammed paper and scribbles down an address. “You’ll find a way to reach Andrew there.”

  Fowler pockets the address. “I’m coming back if he’s not there.”

  “Yes.” Pang sighs. “I’m aware you are.”

  52.

  Lara’s car passes through a cloud of colored incense marking a Buddhist holiday. Wipers wash away the purple fog. They’ve been driving toward Preah Vihear, on the Thai-Cambodian border.

  Kyle sits with his head tilted, near catatonic, trying to keep his brain from pouring out his nose.

  Lara lights a cigarette, whispers, “You’ve got to hold it together.”

  “I am.”

  “You haven’t spoken since we left.”

  “Neither have you,” Kyle points out.

  She doesn’t respond.

  Kyle sits up, drums his fingers against the dashboard.

  “Take the wheel for a sec,” Lara says to Kyle.

  Lara gets involved in a series of text messages, gets frustrated, starts muttering.

  “The Chinese are all over my associates,” she says, pointing to her phone. “Guy named Dean just got in touch. He’s a business friend of Robinson’s. Said he was followed all day and then interrogated by a branch of the Chinese secret service.” She drags on the cigarette. “Last night I asked a girlfriend to check on my place.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Berlin. Someone wrecked it from top to bottom.”

  She hands Kyle her iPhone. He looks at the photos of what’s left of her apartment. Someone cleared off the photos and pictures and took a sledgehammer to the walls. All the furniture has been sliced open and the stuffing dumped out. Food and papers lie haphazardly on the floor.

  “They took my computer too,” she says.

  “Sorry.” He hands her the phone. “Sorry that happened.”

  “Honestly,” she says, “I always kind of hated the place. Robinson bought it for me. It’s
his taste. Not mine. When he gets me a gift, it’s never anything I want or like. He thinks he knows better.”

  She stops short to let a dozen cows pass. They stare at her with empty moon eyes. Kyle looks to the side of the road, spots a python that’s just eaten. The face is smug, satiated. Kyle watches the slow pilgrim’s progress of dinner through the swollen scales.

  Lara honks the horn, throws up her hands. The cows don’t care; the snake snaps its head, its digestion disturbed.

  She goes around the cows, and they drive through unvarnished rural poverty. Starving wild dogs living under shacks and terrorizing the inhabitants. A family sleeping in a hammock, limbs peeking through the netting, a treasure dredged from the sea. Busted barbed fencing, a thatched roof on fire from the drought, an unbroken field of baked dirt and banyan trees.

  Then the radio dies without warning. No stations. No static. No signal.

  “Where’d it go?” Kyle asks. He pulls out his BlackBerry. Frozen. Someone’s jamming the area’s frequency. He puts his head back and closes his eyes. “Fantastic.”

  Lara slows down.

  There are two armored Maybach 62s blocking the road, all four corners of each car guarded by men with guns.

  Kyle sits up and takes notice. “Shit,” he mutters. “Shit. Is this normal?”

  “What’s normal these days, Kyle?”

  One of the guards walks to the middle of the road and holds his hand up for Lara to stop. He’s flanked by two comrades, both of whom slide H & Ks off their shoulders and aim directly at the car. They all sport the same outfit, triplets of the security-rental generation. Flesh-tone wireless earpieces. White shirts, no ties, buttons undone enough to show off seriously worked-out chests. Their matching black suits are standard issue straight out of Medellín—bulletproof.

  Lara rolls the car to a stop. “Looks like we’re on.”

  53.

  They step out of the car and immediately the guards yell:

  “Hands. See your hands.”

  As Kyle watches the three guards approach he wonders, Why do these private-security guys always seem to come in threes? Is it so if you shoot one, the other two still have someone to talk to?

  “Against the car,” says one guard in an English accent. He’s middle aged. Bullet-bald. Day or two of beard. Kyle figures he’s probably former SAS fresh from pacification work near a pipeline. He knows the type; these are the guys who guard Chandler.

  English steps to the side, keeping his H & K trained on them, and sends his two associates over to search Lara and Kyle. They strip her of her Walther, run a wand and then a bug sweeper. One of the guards—fucker’s got a neck thick as someone’s thigh—decides to spend a little extra time searching Lara’s legs and torso.

  Until English puts an end to it with a hand slice and a disapproving head shake.

  “Move,” English says to Lara and Kyle, and he leads them to one of the Maybachs.

  “What about my car?” Lara says.

  “We’ll take care of it.” English says.

  “Need my keys?”

  “Not necessary.”

  Lara brings a cigarette to her lips.

  “No smoking in the Maybach,” English says.

  Lara and Kyle step into the car’s opulent cocoon. The windows aren’t blacked out; they’re silk curtained. There’s a flat-screen television in the corner. News is splayed across the screen—stock graphs like a sick man’s EKG, insolvency fears, Chinese bitching about T-bonds.

  The steel divide separating front and back opens. A guard turns around and tosses two black woolen masks sans eyeholes to Kyle and Lara. “Put them on,” he says, and watches them do it.

  As Kyle slides on the mask, he thinks, Christ, I really hope this works out better than the last time I had to wear something over my head.

  54.

  Hands pull Kyle and Lara out of the backseat.

  “You can take them off,” someone says.

  They comply, wait for their eyes to adjust to the light.

  They’re encircled by eight guards—somewhere, these guys managed to pick up a few more. English steps to the front, dangles Lara’s Walther by the trigger ring as if it were a pair of scissors. “We’ll leave this in your glove compartment.”

  She nods.

  “Now walk,” English says, and points ahead to a private airstrip, smack in the middle of rural farmland.

  Resting there is a personalized Airbus A380 superjumbo—one of only three such jets under private ownership—with the word Comanche written on the side in swirling pink letters, like the opening credits of a 1980s teen movie.

  Kyle stops in his tracks. A few hundred feet away, the scourge of post-Communist Russia is waiting to see Robinson. And it’s not like Kyle wants this to happen, but his legs freeze.

  “We can’t stop here,” she says.

  “I know. I’m just…I’m…” He whispers, “I’m fucking freaking.”

  “Hold it together,” Lara says, and takes his hand for an instant. “I’m right here.”

  English shouts through cupped hands, “Shake it, boys and girls. No stopping.”

  Kyle stares at the body of the jet. The fucking thing is equipped with missile jammers. Don’t bleed. Don’t bleed.

  Yes. This is worse, far worse, than you imagined, but you signed on for this. The minute you ran from home, you signed on for this. The minute you decided it was easier to take Robinson’s passport than it was to face down your problems at home, you signed on for this. Protosevitch may very well be your road to Calvary. Your only hope of freedom runs right through this jet. If you have any interest in getting your life back from Robinson, you better pull this off.

  Protosevitch stands at the top of the stairs, waiting for his guests.

  He spots Lara and Kyle and starts to wave with his whole arm. A welcoming gesture—except he’s got a .500 Magnum crammed down the front of his tailored slacks. He extracts the gun and fires twice into the air, which is so choked by humidity, that the shots sound like holding a shell to your ear. “That’s how happy I am to see you. Hurry up inside,” he yells, and opens his arms wide.

  Lara starts up the red-carpeted steps, then turns back to Kyle. “See. He’s happy to see us.”

  55.

  Protosevitch greets them at the top of the steps. “Come in. Come in,” he says, putting the Magnum back in his pants and ushering them into the gutted cabin of the jet, built to seat close to a thousand and converted into his own airborne condominium. “I can’t wait to show you around,” he says like an eager realtor.

  He opens a gold door, something out of Bluebeard’s legend, and leads them into the belly of the plane.

  Inside, two of Protosevitch’s adolescent sons are playing video games on a 3-D television. They’re both dressed like proper Etonian schoolboys, in black shorts and blazers featuring the school crest, and they have similarly turned-out friends cheering them on while they play a first-person racing game.

  Protosevitch ruffles everyone’s hair to schoolyard shrieks, then kisses his sons’ heads. “Don’t stand so close to the screen, babies,” he says to them. They all answer in unison, “Okay.” The mélange of accents is striking: Russian, English, and French.

  “I don’t want to brag, but my kids are so popular in school. It’s amazing they’re mine. I didn’t speak till I was five. My mother thought I was retarded.” Protosevitch lights a cigarette. “I just didn’t want to talk to her.”

  He flings open another gold door, this one leading to his gym. Housed inside is the newest Nautilus equipment; sleek cardio machines riveted to the floor and topped off with TVs; racks of glimmering free weights. His two teenage daughters are working with a personal trainer who’s encouraging them to go lower to the floor with their squats. Dance music pours from a speaker, and the trainer claps along to it, reminding the girls it’s bikini season and the tabloids are going to be all over the beaches.

  In the corner rests a gleaming marble Jacuzzi. Protosevitch’s wife lounges in it, totally
nude, fake breasts floating atop the bubbles. She sips a margarita and licks the salt from her cartoon lips. Protosevitch’s oldest daughter, noticeably pregnant and also noticeably older than his wife, is getting her shoulders rubbed by her baby daddy, a young man who clenches a cigarette between his teeth.

  Protosevitch walks up and slaps him across the face. “Don’t you fucking smoke near her.” He drags on his own cigarette. “That’s my grandchild in there. Breathing in all your shit. You fucking peasant.”

  Baby Daddy answers in a Cockney accent, “Sorry, Dad.”

  Protosevitch walks back to Kyle and Lara. “You like the place so far?”

  “It’s amazing,” Lara says.

  “Amazing,” Kyle chimes in. Amazing, he thinks, how much it reminds him of the berserk splendor of Chandler’s office, with its omnipresent marble, smoked glass, modern art, and wall after wall of framed awards and achievements. Amazing how the only difference between the absurdity of American and Russian splendor boils down to this: Americans use their wealth to celebrate themselves, while Russians use their wealth to celebrate wealth. This makes sense, given that one country is rooted in individualism and the other abolished private property for seventy years.

  They walk down a long hallway, the space on planes where the air hostesses would hang out and bitch about customers. Protosevitch begins, “The terrorists can’t get you…well, it’s harder for them to get you if you have your own plane. There’s five private airports to every public one. Terrorism is a middle- to upper-middle-class problem. It’s why politicians run on it. ’Cause those are the people who vote, the people who fly commercial and could get blown up. If you’re poor, you never take a plane, you never go anywhere, so you’re safe…well, unless we’re talking poor in Africa, then you’re just fucked. I mean, I got so many people trying to kill me, I don’t need to add Muslims to the mix.”

  Another gold door and into the kitchen. Protosevitch’s personal chef, complete with chef’s toque, rushes over, and the two men kiss. The chef leads Protosevitch to a bubbling pot, pulls off the lid, and dips in a spoon. “Taste,” he says.