Weaponized

by Nicholas Mennuti

  He loves to listen when he makes things explode.

  Fowler hears the roar from the back of the tunnel. Heat and smoke swell toward him. Destruction follows its own immeasurable clock, but in Fowler’s experience, it always arrives faster than you’d think.

  “Fuck me!” he yells, and he scrambles up the ladder, two rungs at a time, back into Mr. Vibol’s office.

  Fowler surfaces and tries to get the steel cover back on in an attempt to contain the damage to the tunnel itself. But the fire has other plans.

  Before Fowler can secure the lid, it flies off from contained force, nearly decapitating him, and lodges itself into the wall, quivering with unspent energy.

  The floor begins to heat up and crumble.

  He’s got to get the hell out of there.

  He rises, darts through the office, jumps over the desk and filing cabinet he tossed aside. Flames punch through the walls; the floor growls and hisses as sections come loose and collapse.

  He makes it into the hallway, sees Li’s security heading toward him, and yells:

  “Turn back. Get the fuck back. He blew the tunnel. This place is gonna go.”

  They don’t need to be told twice, take off back in the direction they came from, Fowler on their tail.

  The door to Mr. Vibol’s office flies off, and flames—with crackling blue tongues—froth into the hall. Inside the office, the heat mounts; the wallpaper bubbles and explodes, the wall underneath follows, and the fluorescent lights pop and dump their contents into the fire.

  Robinson walks through the woods, already aflame from deforestation, already a future ruin when his inferno joins in. He couldn’t be happier to contribute, couldn’t be happier to overflow the heavens with the acrid afterglow of his destruction.

  He throws his head back, luxuriating, savoring, breathing in his true métier.

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  86.

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  The problem with being your own boss, Neil O’Donnell has come to realize, is that the productivity of your day is solely in your own hands, and right now, his hands are occupied, first pouring gin and tonics, and then sliding off Katya’s—his newest intern’s—jean shorts.

  Neil takes a drink, clenches an ice cube between his teeth, and starts running it down Katya’s torso, neck to navel, with some stops in between.

  Katya entered Neil’s hallowed employ last week. Things with Katie, his earlier intern, didn’t pan out and only reinforced a lesson Neil’s college writing professor tried to impart almost twenty years ago:

  “Don’t starting sleeping with your students. Ever. They eventually want you to read their work. And you never want to do that.”

  Neil’s cell phone rings. He doesn’t recognize the number, but it’s eleven in the morning, and people call him at that hour only with dire emergencies.

  87.

  PHNOM PENH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Kyle stands at a pay phone, slouching against the metal shell, and winces in pain. His side is still taped up, stapled, wounded, and draining. He had to lose his spleen and some semi-crucial inches from his small intestine.

  “Hey,” he says, voice cracking. It’s still a strain to speak.

  “The fuck have you been?” Neil explodes. “It’s been weeks. I thought you were dead. What number is this?” He tries to control his word flow. “You have no idea how pissed off I am at you. I was actually going to ask the government for help to find you. You know how scared I was if I was even thinking of involving the fucking government.”

  “Calm down. Okay? I don’t have much time.”

  “Okay,” Neil says. “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Remember you said if I wanted to come home, you’d have a lawyer waiting for me when I get off the plane and that you’d run an exclusive?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Well,” Kyle says, “you’ve got about twelve hours or so to make that happen. I’m at the airport.”

  Just when Neil had started recovering from the shock of hearing from Kyle, he gets hit with this. “What?”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “That’s…that’s fucking fantastic. I’ll get working right now. I’ll start making calls.”

  “Look,” Kyle says, swallowing hard, “before you do that, there’s something you need to know. You need to read between the lines a little, because I’m not sure how…secure this call is. You get me?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  “When I talk to the lawyer and I talk to you…you’re…you’re gonna find out some stuff about me you’re not going to like.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I didn’t run for exactly the reasons I told you I did.”

  “Oh, that,” Neil says. “Yeah. Well, I kind of figured.”

  Now it’s Kyle’s turn to explode. “What?” he says and feels the sting in his side.

  “I sort of suspected but suppressed it. But when you didn’t come back even to avoid being held in contempt, I kinda knew. I mean, if the threat of going to jail wasn’t enough…”

  “You suspected me?”

  “Had no choice.”

  “And you still kept talking to me?”

  “Well…it kinda made me like you a lot less for a few months, but then I just missed you—and whatever you’d done, I wanted you back around,” Neil says. “You’re still my best friend, no matter what, right?”

  Kyle’s caught in the sensory limbo between smiling and crying. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “‘Thank you.’ That’s a good start.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Wow,” Neil says. “You put a little extra on that.”

  Kyle laughs, sniffles. “I’ll see you real soon, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Neil says. “I’ll start making calls.”

  “And don’t spare any expense.” Kyle cradles the phone between his chin and shoulder. “I’m gonna need one hell of a good lawyer.”

  Neil laughs. “Done.”

  Kyle hangs up the phone, picks up his cane, which is resting against the booth, and drags himself back over the café area on a broken ankle still encased in plaster.

  88.

  Kyle joins Fowler at a plastic oval table.

  “Everything good?” Fowler says, pushing a cup of coffee over to him. “You make your call?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle says. “We’re good.”

  Fowler dips into his blazer pocket, pulls out a flask, dumps several shots’ worth of whiskey into his coffee, then grabs Kyle’s cup and does the same. “For the road,” he says. “Long flight. And I don’t have the budget for us to drink the whole time.”

  Kyle nods in thanks. “Can I mix this with painkillers?”

  “I recommend it,” Fowler says. “I can’t afford the duty-free shop either, so I picked that up in town before we left.”

  Kyle tastes it, suppresses a gag. “What is that?”

  “They call it Old Crow.”

  “Yeah, they do,” Kyle says. “Does it get better at any point?”

  “No. Not at all,” Fowler says. “But it doesn’t get any worse.”

  Kyle raises the cup to his lips.

  “It works better if you don’t smell it,” Fowler says, and then pulls a plastic bag out of his pocket and slides it across the table.

  Kyle’s passport.

  “You’re gonna need this,” he says.

  Kyle unzips the bag, removes his passport, and flips through. He’s Kyle West again.

  “Use it more wisely in the future,” Fowler says.

  Kyle forces down another slug of Old Crow. “So I know what I get for going back: I get to go to jail and be let out periodically to testify. What do you get for being the guy who brings me back?”

  “Oh…probably jack-shit,” Fowler says, laughing. “They put me out to pasture a while ago. I wasn’t made for the current incarnation of the Agency.”

  “Maybe they’ll let you go back home too,” Kyle says. “Maybe you can use me to get that for y
ourself.”

  Fowler takes another sip. “I’m not all that sure I want to go back. I never liked the States much.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t…I don’t really relate to anyone there. You send me out to dinner with people my age, I don’t have anything to talk about. I fell in love with Southeast Asia when I was a teenager. It’s too late for me to go anywhere else.”

  “After my prison term is up, I may join you. I got to like it there too. And the States isn’t exactly going to be bursting with opportunities for me.”

  “You come back, you know where to find me.”

  “Any news about Robinson?”

  “We’re trying to trace whoever hired him through the money. He didn’t leave us much of a crime scene to work with. And he’s somehow managed to stay entirely off the grid. I mean entirely.”

  “Money come up with anything yet?”

  “Nah. We can’t investigate most of the suspects. Either they’re already under investigation and we’d be intruding on another operation in progress or they’ve been shut down and the files destroyed.”

  “He’s gone. And you know it.”

  “Everyone gets caught eventually.”

  Kyle raises the Styrofoam cup to his lips. “Do they?”

  “I hope so.” Fowler smiles. “Nothing in my experience leads me to believe it, though.”

  Over the PA system, Kyle and Fowler’s flight is announced.

  “Gate forty-six,” Fowler says. “Finish up your coffee.”

  “I think I’ve had enough Old Crow.”

  Fowler looks at him, lowers his head a little. “Back at the hospital, I told you that you did good. You probably don’t remember. You were busy dying. I’m sure you had other things on your mind. But I meant it. And I still do. You did real good back there. You saved Li, and you saved his family.”

  “Thanks,” Kyle says. “And you’re right. I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to go to jail. Li Bao’s been singing your praises to the Americans for weeks.”

  “No.” Kyle laughs. “I’m going to jail. Li Bao can hold a parade in my honor and they’re still throwing my ass in jail.”

  “Maybe…”

  “I embarrassed Congress. They don’t need any help in that department, and I kept it up for a year. They’re sending me to jail out of spite. Also, you’re forgetting one thing…”

  Fowler looks at him.

  “I did wrong.”

  Fowler pushes in his chair and helps Kyle get to his feet.

  “Thanks,” Kyle says. “I’m still not quite operational.”

  Kyle and Fowler hook a right, step onto the escalator, and descend toward the boarding gate.

  “You know, you’re not quite the asshole I thought you were,” Fowler says. “Someone does what you did, invents a more efficient spying program for Chandler, I gotta think the guy’s a championship asshole.”

  “Don’t get too sentimental. You didn’t know me a year ago.”

  They hit bottom, and Kyle gets his passport ready, leans his weight on the cane, and walks as best he can, supported by Fowler’s hand at his waist.

  “You’re lucky you’re alive,” Fowler says while they walk. “Few people survive major surgery in Cambodia. Most people drown in their own blood before they even make it to surgery. First thing you do when you get home is find someone to look at that.”

  Kyle approaches the attendant at the gate, hands her his ticket and passport.

  “Washington, DC. One way,” she says, inspecting both.

  Kyle nods in affirmation. “That’s right.” Home, he thinks, home, to be subject to the vicissitudes of fate and, even scarier, to the byzantine American legal system and Congress.

  At least I’ve got my name back.

  89.

  KENYA, AFRICA

  Lamu Beach has been rendered private for the next few days. Armed guards—baking in the sun in their black uniforms—stand at several access points checking identification, making sure none of the locals sneak in and disturb the legion of visiting businessmen.

  The National Oil Corporation of Kenya is hosting a conference this week to receive bids for exploratory crude drilling. The country is relatively untapped as a crude exporter, and the discovery of viable resources in Uganda has everyone from Texans to the Chinese to the Russians to the French and Germans besieging the continent and placing bids.

  Yachts and sailboats navigate the calm and convivial waves. The shoreline is littered with sand dollars and hot-pink aquatic life. The sand itself is iridescent white, almost like salt, and it squeaks under bare feet.

  Robinson emerges from the crest of a wave, stands, and rubs the water over his face. He wears black bathing trunks that end above the knee. The modesty of his attire sets him apart from the Russians and Europeans, who favor a more crotch-suffocating fit.

  Robinson walks to the shore, steps over cracked scalloped shells, and sits down on his white beach blanket. His skin is in the awkward stage between burning and tanning. He takes a sip of bottled water and lights a cigarette. Almost absentmindedly, he rubs a still-forming scar on the side of his neck.

  He turns around, notes the armed guards, and waves at a passing tourist. “Gérard,” Robinson says, paying close attention to the French pronunciation, and waves him over.

  Gérard strolls over to Robinson’s blanket, flip-flops filling up with sand, umbrella tucked under his arm. His torso is slathered with sunblock, and dark chunky lenses shield his eyes.

  Robinson rises to greet him, and the resemblance is startling.

  They’re the same height, have the same color eyes, the same body type—mesomorphic muscularity in the shoulders and chest, but with a tendency to hold weight in the middle—and the same dark hair, although Gérard’s is shorter and thinner and parted on the side while Robinson’s is slicked back.

  “How are you up this early after last night?”

  “Lying down wasn’t getting me anywhere.” Robinson smiles. “Figured I might as well get tan with a hangover.”

  Gérard laughs, points to Robinson’s cigarettes. “May I?”

  “Of course,” he says. “When’s your meeting with the Kenyans?”

  “Tomorrow at two. Yours?”

  “Today,” Robinson says. “Four o’clock.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m going.” Gérard lights the cigarette. “Chinese can outbid us all. Only thing I can offer is Gallic charm.”

  Robinson laughs. “A contradiction in terms.”

  Gérard exhales smoke. “Four o’clock today.”

  “Right. I head out tomorrow morning.”

  “Back to the States?”

  Robinson nods.

  “Then that’s it?”

  “For now.”

  “But who will show me how to fill my nights? I’m no good on my own.”

  “We still have one more,” Robinson says. “My room at eight. Dress to the nines. Party starts there, then we move out after sufficient social lubrication.”

  “Bien.” Gérard slaps Robinson’s knee. “Bien. One last hurrah. Just the two of us.”

  “Well, not exactly just us. I’ve procured us company of the supple kind.”

  Gérard smiles. “I had hoped.”

  “What’s your taste?”

  “You choose for me. Your taste is impeccable.”

  “What do you have at home?”

  “Why?”

  “A friend of mine in Berlin owns a nightclub. Runs a legion of the most beautiful girls you could imagine. Not a flaw in the bunch. But you know which girl makes the most money?”

  Gérard shrugs.

  “The goth girl covered in tattoos. Pneumatic body. Piercings. Bottle-dyed black hair. That girl makes more money than women so perfect they border on parody.” Robinson takes the cigarette from between Gérard’s fingers and inhales. “Want to know why that girl makes so much?”

  “Why?”

  “No one has anything like her at home. Men go out, they
want something new. So I ask again: What have you got at home?”

  “Brunette. Petite.”

  Robinson sends the smoke out his nose. “Then I work from there.”

  “I look forward to your selection.”

  “And don’t forget your passport, just in case we decide to leave the city limits. We don’t want to get caught in a random inspection.”

  “Thank you.” Gérard nods. “I always leave it behind in the safe.”

  “It’s what I do.” Robinson smiles, practicing in his head how to say Gérard’s name with the proper intonation and estimating how much of his own hair he’s going to need to cut off and shave back to make this work.

  Gérard returns the grin, and Robinson slowly molds his own to match his new friend’s.

  “It’s what I do,” Robinson repeats softly as he buries his toes in the soft hot sand.

  Acknowledgments

  Nicholas Mennuti

  My mother, Virginia, the champion of taking a late-night phone call where I wonder what I’m doing with my life. Michael Bitalvo, the perpetually good-natured recipient of many a rough first-draft. John Schoenfelder, for getting this process started, and Josh Kendall, for steering it to a firm landing. Jonah Straus, for reading one of my short stories and offering to rep me. Sven Birkerts and Stephanie Dickinson, for giving me my first publications. And at the risk of invoking my superiors, Cliff Martinez, whose aural soundscapes provided the book’s unofficial soundtrack, and Graham Greene, for showing any thriller writer how it’s done. And lastly, David Guggenheim, collaborator and best-friend…a hefty job description for one man. And like everything else, you carry it with grace.

  David Guggenheim

  To my amazing parents Peter and Leni; my brothers and idols, Marc and Eric; all my unbelievable nieces; Nick Mennuti, a great writer, friend, and shrink; producers extraordinaire Scott Stuber and Alexa Faigen; my incredible reps, David Boxerbaum, Adam Kolbrenner, and Jamie Afifi; and the holy trinity of storytellers, Ian Fleming, William Goldman, and Lawrence Kasdan.