Fowler leans over Ricki’s shoulder and examines the insides of the laptop. “Chinese hired muscle. Supercomputers. The hell is going on in my city?”
“Sounds good to me. This city needs some excitement.”
Fowler begins to massage Ricki’s shoulders with his grizzly-like grip. “You know, Rick,” he says. “Well…you know how much I like you, right?”
Ricki is withering under Fowler’s hands.
“I consider you a friend,” Fowler says. “And a friend is someone you can trust.”
Ricki bunches up his shoulders, tries to make like a turtle in defense. “Christ, Fowler…you don’t want me to blow you or something, do you?”
“Rick.” Fowler continues kneading the poor kid’s shoulders and neck like a sadistic baker. “I’m going to have to leave you for a while with a valuable piece of illegally obtained evidence. That’s a level of trust I don’t place in anyone.”
“Christ, you are gonna make me blow you.”
“After you find what I need to know, you are going to reassemble this thing and give it back to me directly. And I don’t want you to consider keeping any souvenirs for yourself, either for your own study or to sell to any of your little friends.”
“Okay,” Ricki says. “Okay. Just stop. Stop.”
Fowler tightens his hands. “Promise me, Rick.”
“I promise. I promise. I do.”
“Not one single fucking thing.”
“Just like it was. I won’t keep anything.”
Fowler ruffles Ricki’s hair. “I’m glad we understand each other. I really am.”
60.
Upon entering the hotel room, Lara immediately closes all the curtains, blotting out the semiotic seizure of neon from the street.
The room could charitably be called functional. However, if one was feeling uncharitable, then blighted with bugs and stains and having a rank smell emanating from the walls—a scent generally associated with advanced decay—would also apply.
Lara slams the door, checks the locks—none of which work—and shakes her head. She moves the sad carcass of a floral lounge chair over, tries to jam it under the doorknob, but it doesn’t fit. “That’s not promising.” She moves the chair back and continues her security check in the bathroom.
Kyle watches her, lost in her lithe movements. Even her most casual motions have a feral fluidity that’s hypnotic. He feels the fear rise and push against the wall of his stomach. It’s terrifying to be this close to your object of desire, especially when said object can actually kill you.
“Let’s get a drink,” she says. “I’ll kill myself if I have to do more than sleep here.”
All the black lights not presently in college dorm rooms next to Led Zeppelin posters have ended up in this bar. The place is bathed in carnival tones of blue, orange, and green. The bottled alcohol looks like something a witch would give you for potency problems. The polka dots on the cocktail napkins are surreal children’s vitamins.
Kyle’s gin-based drink glows green. He takes a sip and notes a distressing fact about black lights: They don’t reflect anything. They don’t throw off any shadows. They siphon off all the objects around them and give nothing back. It’s a vampiric form of lighting. Cancels out all chance of duality.
“What is this place?”
“All the expats hang here. That’s why I chose it. Westerners don’t stick out.”
“It looks like the inside of a clown’s stomach,” Kyle says. “Tell me something. What exactly is our plan for tomorrow?”
“Robinson is going to show up to get his intel at ten thirty. And we’re going to meet him there.”
“You’re sure he knows.”
“The way Andrei talked to us about it, Robinson knows. He’ll be there.”
“What if he doesn’t show?”
“Then he’ll send someone. He’ll send his own courier to meet the guy. We just need to watch for the Chinese holding the intel. He’s the key. We find that guy, we find Robinson.”
“Then what?”
“If Robinson shows, problem solved. If not, we grab whoever Robinson sends in his place and force him to take us to Robinson.”
“We don’t know what the guy holding the intel looks like. He’s going to be an Asian guy just hanging out by the harbor. That’s not an odd sight in Cambodia.”
“You did a great job today. But don’t get ahead of yourself. I’ll make this work. This isn’t the part you’re supposed to be good at.”
“Okay,” Kyle says.
“Really?”
“What choice do I have?”
“Now tell me something,” Lara says. “How’d you get into tech stuff?”
“You want to hear about Chandler again. It’s okay. Everyone does. He’s our generation’s Howard Hughes and I was behind the curtain.”
“I don’t care about Chandler. I want to know about you. How’d you get into tech?”
“You really want to know about me?”
“We’re sitting in a bar together, relaxing, drinking. Isn’t that what people do? Talk about their careers and stuff?”
Kyle nods. “Yeah. They do.” It’s been so long that he’s forgotten. His only friend and drinking buddy for the past year has been Armand, and their whole relationship is predicated on the fact neither of them ever asks the other anything directly personal.
“I got into tech because of my mother,” Kyle says. “She was a revolutionary. A social revolutionary, to use her exact words.”
Lara laughs. “Your mom was a Commie?”
Kyle nods, laughs, sips his drink.
“You’re like half of Russia,” she says. “A tech geek with an anarchist in the family.”
“When I was a kid, she saw this news special on home computers. It really blew her away. She was all excited, said technology was going to be the path to the new revolution. She made my dad buy me a computer the next day. I’ve been programming and writing code ever since.”
“What’s your mom doing now?”
“Everyone’s gone. I got sent to live with my grandparents when I was fifteen.”
“So your parents were social revolutionaries and you ended up working for Chandler. How does that happen?”
“It’s…it’s like, when you can’t rebel against your parents, when they’re more out there than you, the only thing you can do is embrace sanity. You…you become a square. Become a corporate drone. You become me and go to work for Chandler.”
“Why’d you get sent to live with your grandparents?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long night in general.”
“I’m gonna need more gin.”
“Not a problem.”
He finishes off the drink. Lara flags down a waitress, her black hair gone arctic blue under the light, and orders another round.
Kyle begins. “In the late sixties, my mom was going to Columbia. Total hotbed of radical student activity. SDS, all those guys. Her sophomore year, she was an exchange student in West Germany. Met my dad there. He was German. Mom had always been a radical…her folks were Communists. She was one of the original red-diaper babies.”
Lara’s riveted, moves her hand to pick up her drink but forgets about it halfway through the motion.
“Mom got involved with the second generation of the Red Army Faction while she was in Berlin. It was a natural step for her. My dad fell in with the RAF too, but that was because he was trying to fall in with my mom. The whole goal of second-generation RAF was to get the first generation of fighters sprung from prison. So my mom and dad’s cell teamed up with another cell from Palestine and kidnapped an ex-Nazi industrialist. They released videos. Said they were going to hold him hostage until their comrades were let out of prison. The state wouldn’t give in, called their bluff. So thirty-something days later, the RAF killed the industrialist. Dumped his body in a field. My parents were murderers now. No going back.”
Lara nods, not in response but in commiseration. Kyle’s life feels
achingly familiar. Failed revolution, family on the run, death and the state.
“So my folks ran to Palestine,” he continues. “I was born there. We moved around a lot, lived in a bunch of revolution-friendly countries. Mozambique, Syria, Iraq. Then, out of the blue, two Stasi agents show up in Baghdad looking for my mom and dad. They invited us to come live in East Germany. Mom and Dad were considered model fighters for the Communist cause, and the German worker state would be happy to protect them. So I ended up living in East Berlin.”
“Damn,” Lara says. “You grew up crazier than me.”
“It’s all subjective.”
“Keep going.”
“Things were quiet for a long time. My folks got state jobs and housing. Mom was a teacher. Dad worked in a lab. Then the Wall came down, and the security services crumbled with it. The Stasi was liquidated. There went our protection. All the Stasi records were turned over to the reunified Germany. My folks were still wanted for murder in the West. The records gave everyone away. All the terrorists the state was protecting.”
The waitress drops off their drinks. Kyle takes a long sip.
“My folks never made it to trial,” he says. “They…they killed themselves. Utopia had finally been dismantled.” He keeps his emotions in check. “That’s the hardest thing, I guess…I mean, for me. The thing I’ve never been able to work past. I hoped I’d have been reason enough for them to stay around. I mean, even if the dream was dead, at least they still had me. But I suppose I wasn’t.”
“I’m sure that’s not what they were thinking,” Lara says. “I’m sure they weren’t thinking.”
“Twenty years later, every fucking morning I still wake up and think, I’m an orphan. Even on a day like today.”
Lara smiles. “It’s kind of ironic, if you think about it. I mean, you and your parents. They spend their whole lives rebelling against the state. You go and work for the state. I mean, Chandler is basically the state. And you both end up running. The state always gets you. Whether you rebel against it or serve it, it fucks you in the end.”
Kyle returns her smile. “Fair point.”
“Or maybe you just got so used to running, you were looking for a way to keep going. Working for Chandler certainly fits that bill. You’re just like me and Robinson. We’ve lived everywhere and still have no home.”
“I thought Robinson went where the money took him.”
“I don’t think it’s ever been about the money for him.”
“What, then?”
“He’s terrified of quiet. I don’t think at any point in his life things were…calm. He doesn’t talk about his family, ever. Which means it must have been terrible. People who can’t shut up about their families aren’t nearly as fucked up as people who never say a word.” She laughs. “He can never be still. Ever. He only seems alive when someone wants to kill him. Love certainly never did that for him.”
“What did it for him, then?”
“Planning. He loves to plan. I always tell him he should have been a director. He loves to set stages. Before he’ll even engage you, he has to make sure the lighting in the room is right, has to check his hair.”
Kyle thinks back to his brief time with Robinson, and what Lara’s saying adds up. When he visited Robinson’s hotel room, everything down to the ice cubes seemed selected for maximum effect.
“Before I meet anyone for him,” she says, “he has to bathe me, pick out my clothes, fix my hair for hours. But there’s not any affection in it. We’re all his props. He blocks us how he sees fit. You know that as well as I do.”
“But you love him, right? You’re together.”
“That’s right.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. You told me…you said he abandoned you. Hung you out to dry with a bunch of contracts. Left you with a price on your head. But you…you’re still…you’re still out here loving him and looking for him.”
“Robinson and I are a matched set. Don’t get in the way of that.”
“Why don’t you walk away?”
“I can’t. Look…subtracting my feelings for Robinson, I owe a hell of a lot of money because of him.”
“Then get someone else to do the jobs.”
“People pay for Robinson, they want Robinson.”
“Take away the money, then. Just take that off the table for one question. Why else are you looking for him?”
“Kyle,” she says sadly, “don’t start getting ideas about what you don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand. Because it doesn’t seem to me like he loves you. Nothing you told me makes me think that.”
“What? You and me are gonna walk off into the sunset together when this is over?” She takes a drink. “God. I fuck you once in the shower, and your brain gets shot to shit. You think you can take Robinson’s place? Be my partner? Think.”
Although she’s absolutely right, Kyle’s still hurt.
“When you talk about me and Robinson,” she says, “you’re not talking about sex and love and commitment. You’re talking about something bigger than that. You’re talking about identity.”
“I don’t understand.”
She smiles. “Then you’re lucky.”
Kyle looks around the bar, at the clusters of expats partying under the psychedelic lights, at servicemen and -women—mostly American and Israeli—blowing off steam, dropping drugs on their tongues, and dancing.
“It doesn’t mean we can’t have fun,” Lara says. “You had fun before, didn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then stop asking questions you don’t want answers to and let’s do something more constructive.”
She leans over the table and kisses him. Their talk is over.
61.
Fowler walks into his office and is greeted by Rebecca, who’s sitting behind his desk, working on his computer, wearing his glasses perched on the bridge of her pert nose.
“Make yourself at home.”
She motions to his glasses. “How do you see out of these things?”
“Not all that well.”
“I cleaned off all the smudges. How did you read?”
“I pretty much didn’t.”
“I’ve got a few things for you to not read.” She hands him a sheet of paper.
Fowler squints like a mole trying to decide where to burrow.
“I’ll summarize,” she says. “It’s from Langley. Telling us Robinson isn’t worth our man-hours and to let the locals handle it. What do we do about it?”
“It reopens a long-standing question I’ve had about our employers: Are they criminal, or just criminally inept?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I don’t recall receiving that letter. Do you?”
“Fowler…”
“They already tossed us here. What fresh hell are they going to invent to dump us in if we keep going on Robinson?”
“There’re always new hells.”
“So I retire and you go work in the private sector. What’s next?”
“You consider the matter settled?”
Fowler nods. “To my satisfaction. But you don’t have to take my path.”
“I would have happily jumped off, but then I found this.” She motions him to join her behind the desk.
Fowler stands behind her. She tilts the monitor so they can both see the screen. It’s the Web site for a German telecommunications firm called VodaFone.
Rebecca’s blown up a particular employee’s curriculum vitae, and, in true European fashion, the candidate has included a recent head shot on the first page. This particular résumé quirk is considered an illegal discriminatory practice in the United States; however, fortress Europe is clearly willing to cede the higher moral ground so it can hold on to the inalienable right not to hire old or fat people.
Rebecca zooms in on the head shot, shrinks the surrounding text, and blows up the photo. “Does he look familiar to you?”
Fowler squints again.
Reb
ecca shrinks the photo and blows up the text. The top of the résumé clearly reads:
JULIAN ROBINSON
Below the name is an address and a telephone number.
“How did you find this?”
“A couple thousand name and image searches, plus Google translate,” Rebecca says. “Mostly innate brilliance.”
“Very good.”
“I want a better compliment, Fowler.”
He puts his hand on her shoulder. “You’ve outdone yourself. Seriously.”
“I know.”
“Pull up everything you can about VodaFone. And go through the rest of Robinson’s résumé. Check out all those other companies he listed. See if they’re all legit, like VodaFone. See if any of them have had charges filed against them recently. I want to know how anyone employed by VodaFone could end up on a no-fly list.”
“What happened at Pang’s?”
“Besides him shooting at me?”
“We’ll get back to that one.”
Fowler’s surprised. “You don’t seem concerned.”
“Clearly he didn’t hit you.”
Fowler can’t argue with that. “Couple of things. The most important being, he told me the guy in that photo we’ve been showing around isn’t Robinson. Apparently, he’s a local guy calling himself Andrew. Another American. Guy went to Pang looking for documents a few months back.” He points to the computer screen. “About two days ago, that guy, Robinson, came into Pang’s club and had a huge streak. I get an address from Pang for this Andrew. I go check out his place. It’s cleared out—except in the bathroom, I find this.” He pulls out his phone, starts flipping through pictures of the bathroom’s tub and sink. “This Andrew was clearly making some cosmetic changes. I’ve got someone helping me try to identify him.”
Rebecca screws up her face. “Who?”
“No one. Just someone I use for help every once in a while.”
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