Weaponized

by Nicholas Mennuti

  “The courier.” Protosevitch raises his fingers. “Figure he’s going heavy. Then figure in his backup. No one travels alone with intel like this. It’s too valuable.”

  Kyle wants to ask how valuable but knows better.

  Lara interjects. “Numbers?”

  “Not sure. Just him and backup,” Protosevitch says. “I wasn’t able to get backup numbers on such short notice. I’m sorry. I could only get profile and price.”

  “No. No. It’s fine. Time is something we don’t have.” Kyle breathes in, takes a big risk. “Same location as you said?”

  “Yeah. Siem Reap,” Protosevitch says. “Courier’s plane touches down, then he hops the boat to the harbor. You’ll find him once he lands. You got lucky on this one, Julie. It’s tough to shake someone down in an airport. Harbor’s gonna be much easier.”

  “Time?”

  “Same. Ten thirty. Morning,” Protosevitch says.

  Lara cuts in. “Do we know if his backup is going to be local or Chinese?”

  “It’s gonna be Chinese,” Protosevitch says. “No hired muscle from here is gonna make this guy feel safe enough. He’ll want his home crew.” Protosevitch leans back on the couch, lights a cigarette. “Now we gotta talk figures. The gun was bought and paid for. We’re good on that. But for this shit, now, I’ve gotta ask for cash. Whether or not you pull this off, you’re gonna be so hot afterward, I can’t be seen taking a transfer from you. I’m already on everyone’s watch list. It’s gotta be cash. Especially if you’re successful.”

  Kyle nods. “You’ll get it.”

  “I know I will,” Protosevitch says, with his first real hint of intimidation.

  Kyle shares a look with Lara that radiates clarity of purpose.

  Time to get the hell out of here and over to Siem Reap posthaste so they can crash Robinson’s deal.

  Protosevitch looks pensive. “Julian…”

  Kyle meets his gaze. “Yeah.”

  “You that bored with living or something?”

  “As in?”

  “This job. You fuck it up, they kill you. You do it right, someone’s gonna kill you for knowing. It can’t just be the money.”

  “You’re gonna talk to me about doing things for money?”

  Protosevitch is almost insulted. “I never did anything for money. You know that.”

  “Then why?”

  “I never told you?”

  Kyle shakes his head. “No.”

  “I did it because…because no one stopped me.”

  Kyle’s taken aback. Protosevitch sounds exactly like Chandler. The raging, near psychotic accumulation of power for no other reason than to see how much you can get away with taking.

  Lara laughs. “Come on…getting rich has always been the secondary thing for you two. You’re both lucky enough to make money off the things you’d do for free.”

  There’s total silence, until Protosevitch cracks up and points at her. “She’s right, you know. She knows us better than we know ourselves.” He laughs even louder. “She knows you too well, Julie. You’re gonna have to kill her one of these days.”

  56.

  A woman wearing striped pajamas leads Fowler up the twisting steps of the guesthouse. Most women in Cambodia wear these pajamas, and Fowler—even after spending the better part of a war here—still has no idea why. He also doesn’t understand the local women who go into the ocean fully clothed. It’s not custom. It’s not exaggerated modesty either. Not in a city where every third storefront offers a Bacchanalian catalog of bar-dancing and illicit carnality.

  She opens up the room and silently leaves Fowler to his business. The floor-unit air conditioner has been switched off, and the room suffers for it. Fowler starts sweating before he even commences his search. He takes off his jacket, rolls up his sleeves, and abandons all thoughts of lighting a cigarette. There’s not enough space in the air for smoke.

  He approaches the bed, rips off the covers, runs his hand under the sheets, then tosses the mattress onto its side. Nothing. He sinks to the floor, takes a look under the bed, bare except for a few Diet Coke cans among dust bunnies.

  The nightstand is next. A Bible, some allergy medicine, green-tinted antacids in a plastic wrapper, and an extension cord.

  Fowler’s trying to concentrate, to keep calm, but it’s hard, because this is his favorite part of the job. He built his career on being a soldier, but snooping, being a voyeur with a badge, that’s his passion. There’s nothing more thrilling than rifling through someone’s shit. And the best, the absolute apex, is when the site of your search is a woman’s apartment. But not for the reasons you’d think.

  Women are so much better at hiding their secrets. They really make you work to find them.

  No time for fantasy. Fowler’s got Andrew to focus on.

  He moves into the bathroom, hits the lights. Now, this is more noteworthy, he thinks. The drain is clogged with thick clumps of brown hair. The sink’s surface and basin has a sandpaper feel, courtesy of beard growth floating in shaving cream.

  Fowler turns, checks out the shower. The tub and drain are sticky with hair-dye residue. And the garbage can overflows with stained rubber gloves, tubes of dye, a comb choked with hair, and several worn razor blades.

  Fowler digs into his pocket, pulls out his phone, and takes pictures of the scene. Someone left here in a hurry.

  Back in the bedroom, he runs his fingers along the wall, feeling for anything out of the ordinary. He stops at the picture of Buddha, studies it, gives the surrounding wall a couple of sturdy knocks, and then removes the Bodhisattva, revealing a small built-in safe.

  There’s a combination lock on it, nothing serious, just a twist-and-pull kind of deal. But Fowler doesn’t have the time to crack it manually. He takes the butt of his gun, pounds the dial until it breaks, and then opens the safe.

  Inside, there’s a few stacks of American bills in small denominations, and that’s it. Fowler’s disappointed. The adrenaline juice of discovery fading in record time.

  He takes another look around.

  Sitting on the desk is a laptop. Fowler approaches it. Fucking strange, he thinks. This room he’s in—Andrew’s room—this guy clearly thought he was coming back at some point. You don’t leave your laptop and cash behind if you’re pulling a permanent disappearing act.

  Fowler hits the power key on the laptop, and the screen comes to life. But before any information displays, the computer asks for a password.

  Thing is locked.

  Fowler’s not a Luddite, but he’s certainly not a hacker. He unplugs the laptop from the wall outlet and takes it with him.

  57.

  Fowler walks into the cafeteria at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and makes his way around the lunch line, past the stacks of trays and students calling out orders to cooks sweating through paper hats.

  Fowler cuts between dining tables that resemble plastic spiders, a large circle with six sprouting connected legs.

  He keeps walking until he finds an eighteen-year-old sitting by himself and reading a textbook on C++. The kid is named Ricki, and it looks like he hasn’t started shaving yet.

  The first time Fowler met Ricki—whom he calls Rick—he told the kid he looked like a school shooter: camouflage shorts, hoodie, shaved head, and weight-lifting gloves. Fowler liked him—the kid had a certain tropical Dickensian flair—and he threw Rick a few bucks to buy some decent clothes. Even though Fowler was there to arrest him.

  Fowler pulls out a chair, gets comfortable, crosses his legs.

  Ricki freezes. “The hell you doing here, Fowler?”

  “It’s okay. I’m not on official business.”

  Ricki, like many industrious kids in the third world without money or parents, found solace on the Internet. Unfortunately, his hobbies included setting up sharing sites for music, movies, and porn. This wasn’t Fowler’s problem—those small sins fell into ICE’s wheelhouse—but Ricki decided not to stop there.

  Fowler did have to get invol
ved when Ricki started an online casino site and the government ordered it shut down because their kickback money was drying up. Ricki had cornered the market on their turf. When Fowler broke down Ricki’s door, he found a sixteen-year-old kid worth two million dollars.

  Hun Sen’s government was more than happy, jubilant even, to settle with Ricki and not press charges. All Ricki had to do was forfeit every cent of his ill-gotten gains directly to the treasury. After that, Ricki “retired,” and Fowler made a few calls to get him enrolled in the university.

  Fowler folds his arms on the table and tries to sound like a concerned parent. “Studying hard, I hope.”

  “I knew all this shit when I was twelve,” Rick answers. “Got a cigarette?”

  “Why you reading it, then?”

  “Book is filled with mistakes. I’m writing them all down. Send it back to the publisher. Tell them they’re fucking idiots. Ripping off the school.”

  Fowler slides him a cigarette. “I need your expertise on something.”

  Ricki lights the butt. “What?”

  Fowler puts the laptop on the table. “I need you to open this thing up for me.”

  “First thing you do is press power.”

  Fowler smiles. “You’re such a prick. Now, listen. I didn’t exactly come into this”—he motions to the laptop—“in a clean manner. So I can’t have our guys look at it. This is strictly a you-and-me kind of thing.”

  “Better you came to me. Your guys couldn’t open it anyway.”

  “They caught you.”

  “Nope. I read the records. You guys got tipped off. You never would have found me otherwise.”

  Fowler tries to sound paternal again. “Everyone gets caught.”

  “No, they don’t.” Ricki opens up the laptop, presses the power button, and faces the password encryption.

  “Can you get through that?”

  “Don’t know yet.” Ricki tries a quick work-around he uses for unsophisticated encryption. The computer immediately freezes, then shuts down. “Yeah. This could take some time.”

  “How long?”

  “Depends on how good it is.”

  “How good is it?”

  “Well, thing is, this fucker looks homemade to me. He took the shell of a PC and cleaned out everything from the ground floor.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you’re not dealing with someone looking to illegally download porn. I’ve got to look under the hood, see what makes her tick.” He runs his hand along the side of the laptop as if it were the small of a woman’s back. “She’ll talk to me eventually.”

  Fowler laughs. “Ever do that to a girl?”

  “Sure,” Ricki says. “Your mom, last night.”

  “Ouch. Defaming dear Mrs. Fowler like that. It’s almost like you know her.” Fowler reaches across and takes Rick’s sandwich off the tray.

  Ricki looks down at his empty plate. “Help yourself, by the way.”

  Fowler chews. “I can’t leave this thing with you. It’s evidence. You got someplace we can work on it?”

  “Yeah. My place.”

  “Let’s hit it.”

  “I drive,” Ricki says. “I hate it when you drive.”

  “Why?”

  Ricki rises, slings his backpack over his shoulder. “Because I don’t think you care if you live or die. And as your passenger, it concerns me.”

  58.

  Kyle’s in the shower trying to scrub off the sticky sheen of Protosevitch-induced perspiration. He rests his arms against the jade-tiled wall and lets the water run over his hair and shoulders.

  Lara opens the shower curtain partially and pokes her head in. “I want to get out of here soon. How much longer do you need?”

  “Not much. Where are we going?”

  “I want to get to a hotel closer to the ferry. I need time to scope out the site and not have to deal with traffic.”

  “How are we gonna pay for a room? I can’t use Robinson’s cards or my own. The Chinese are probably watching your accounts.”

  “There’s this amazing invention called cash. You give it to people here, and they don’t care where it came from.”

  “Yeah.” Kyle laughs. “That was stupid.”

  She runs her fingers along the scalloped edge of the curtain. “You said the CIA guy saw your face in Robinson’s hotel room…”

  “Right.”

  “Did he say his name?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I mean…you were there. It happened so fast.”

  “See, that bothers me. He’s CIA. Why has there been no media coverage? Why has no one released any photos of you? There were two dead bodies, and you were in the room. Someone’s keeping this a black-ops thing. That means I don’t want to stay in the same place.”

  Kyle respects her logic. “I understand. We’ll go.”

  Lara closes the curtain but stays in the bathroom. “You did a good job today.”

  “Was that a compliment?”

  “Don’t get carried away. I said good.”

  He laughs, shuts his eyes, and works shampoo into his hair with his fingertips.

  Lara pulls open the shower curtain and steps inside. She’s naked and has her hair back in a ponytail. “Is this a problem?”

  He can’t eke out more than a nod and a “No.”

  She moves closer. “Get the shampoo out of your hair before it goes into your eyes.”

  He turns around, rinses off quickly while she finds some room under the nozzle and washes her face.

  After he finishes, Lara holds him by the back of the neck, pulls him in close, and kisses him until they both have to stop because they’re out of breath.

  Kyle backs up, spinning.

  “Know how I knew you weren’t Robinson, even before I saw your face?”

  “How?” Kyle says, still recovering, beads of water running down his face, dropping off his chin.

  “You kissed me like you needed it. Like it was the most important thing in the world. Robinson’s never done that. Ever.” She runs her hands up and down his chest and stomach. “Do you do everything like that?”

  “What about Robinson?”

  “He lets me do whatever I want. He’s more interested in hearing about me fucking other guys. The stories turn him on more than fucking.” She kisses his earlobe, works her tongue down his neck. “You don’t need to worry about him.”

  “Do you want to do it in here?”

  Lara looks up. “That was the plan.”

  Kyle can respond only with “Wow.”

  She laughs. “Thankfully, your body is quicker than your brain.”

  She moves in close again. The water cascades over their kiss.

  Kyle stares at her face. “Your eyes are two different colors.”

  “Yeah.” She laughs. “My body can’t seem to make up its mind about things.”

  She switches positions with him, leans against the wall, and wraps her right leg around his waist. He moves in response, buries himself against her body, holds her breasts in his hands. She runs her leg across his back, rubs herself all over him, back and forth. It feels like velvet. She teases him with the prospect of getting inside—back and forth—but not letting it happen yet.

  Kyle leans his head against her neck.

  Lara smiles. “Still okay with this?”

  59.

  Ricki works at his shitty plastic dorm-room desk surrounded by the tools of his trade. He uses a multiblade precision screwdriver to poke around inside the laptop’s hard drive while his own computer simultaneously streams through data.

  The stereo blasts Scandinavian death metal. Fowler’s slouched in a junked chair—probably rescued from the street—that has zero traction and beer stains on the armrests. He’s zoning out, teetering on sleep, and shocked he doesn’t entirely dislike this music. He can’t put his finger on it, but he suspects it’s the primal screams. They sound like someone begging not to be born.

  Ricki pokes around the circuits, a confounded scientist confronted wi
th a new species.

  Fowler’s pocket starts to vibrate; he looks at his cell, and it’s Grant calling from Indonesia.

  Fowler walks over to Ricki’s stereo and turns down the volume.

  “What’s the matter, Fowler?” Ricki says. “Can’t take a little music while you work?”

  “I gotta take a call,” Fowler says.

  “Cool.” Ricki points at him with the screwdriver. “Gimme a cigarette.”

  Fowler answers the line, hands Ricki a smoke. “You should quit.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I’m broke.” Fowler speaks into the phone. “Hey, Larry.”

  “I got some preliminaries back from the samples.”

  “Okay.” Fowler frantically searches Ricki’s junked-tech graveyard for a pen. Ricki, frustrated as hell, finally slaps Fowler’s hand and gives him what he’s looking for. “Okay. Go ’head.”

  “Fingerprints came back nada. Those two weren’t in our system. I’ve sent copies to a few select people I know at Interpol, but until I hear back, consider that a dead end. Sent out dental, nothing so far. But let’s be honest…wasn’t much left on that front, so it’s gonna take some time. Here’s the part you’ll be interested in. The two guys—Chinese, obviously. But I had some of the clothing samples analyzed. Everything those two had on down to their drawers was custom-made from African cotton. The clothes were local. They weren’t whacked with all the synthetics you get on the open market. And our two were tanner than you’d expect Chinese to be. It’s why I thought they might be local at first. These guys hadn’t spent much time home. So why would Chinese muscle be spending most of their time in Africa?”

  Fowler knows this one. “Guarding Chinese third-world interests. Oil and farmland. You think they were military?”

  “Can’t tell. There were no tats or markings to indicate military. My guess is they were private security.”

  “Thanks, Larry. This is good.”

  “I’ll call you if I hear anything about the fingerprints.”

  Fowler hangs up.

  Ricki’s been bursting to speak the entire time Fowler’s been on the phone. “Fowler, I don’t know where you got this, but this has got to be the sweetest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. You have no clue. It’s like Fort Knox, man. This should be fucking studied. Then hung in a museum.”