by Ronan Frost
“We won’t let you down,” Rye said. It was a stupid thing to say. An impossible promise. But he had every intention of keeping it.
Even if it meant going to hell and back.
FORTY-FIVE
Rye rode with Vic. Carter and Iskra shared the second car.
They had been on the road for hours, not pushing themselves because no matter how far and how fast they drove there was always farther to go. They’d already passed through several climate zones, moving from the oppressive humid heat to bullet rain into heavy mists that obscured the dizzying drop down the mountainside where the narrow road ran far too close to the cliff’s edge for comfort. Vic didn’t elaborate on what had happened outside the embassy, though every now and then he did take his hand from the wheel and flex his fingers as if trying to work the circulation back through them.
Rye noticed he had a habit of checking the rearview mirror to see if there was anyone back there that coincided a little too regularly with the hand flex for it not to be connected deep down in his reptile brain.
They couldn’t go the obvious crow-flies route into Bhutan because of the mountain range, and the Chinese had completely closed down the remaining land border into the country, so Byrne had found the only viable route.
“Doesn’t look like Bhutan is big on visitors.” Byrne was on the speaker.
“What do you mean?” Vic asked, straining forward to see through the still-thickening mist. Visibility was down to no more than thirty feet and, given the drop to the left was considerable, he was taking no chances.
The sound of the road was insulated from the off-roader’s cab.
“Just looking at the hoops they want you to jump through. All sorts of visas, and get this, they charge you an arm and a leg every single day in visitor’s fees just to be in the country. Two hundred and fifty bucks a day. Looks like they’ve discovered the free market.”
“So how do we get in?”
“There are two overland border crossing points: one is from West Bengal into Phuntsholing, the other is Samdrup Jongkhar in the southeast. I’ve made arrangements at the Phuntsholing border for you to pass through. With luck, it should be pretty uneventful.”
“Famous last words,” Rye said.
“Palms have been greased,” Byrne said. “Bhutan, it seems, is fluent in the universal language of greed. Once you’re in, do try to bear in mind you’re totally illegal. No visas, no embassy help. And there’s no telling how long it will take us to get actual practical help to you on the ground, so try not to get into any trouble.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Rye said to Vic, earning a chuckle from the speaker.
“Don’t even joke about it,” Byrne said.
On either side of the road now were tea plantations that rose in tiers up the sides of the hills, the lush greenery glistening with moisture, though occasionally they were afforded glimpses of the Toorsa River. Always ahead of them, the darker outlines of the mountains towered over the land. When the mists finally thinned, the white peaks stood out starkly against the too-blue sky.
They saw women in saris collecting fresh drinking water from bore wells, and emaciated goats walking along the roadside.
It was a six-hour drive down to the border. They talked. How could they not. Most of the conversation was about nothing, sharing odd memories that offered unconscious glimpses into their psyches. One thing that became obvious to Rye was how little he knew the others. The drive back from Matthew Langley’s jail cell, then the mess of Stockholm, meant he’d forged a bond with Vic, but he knew next to nothing about Iskra or Carter, and whenever he tried to ask his companion about them, all he would say is that theirs were not his stories to tell. Rye had to respect that, but going into the mountains they would be putting their lives very firmly in each other’s hands, and it felt odd trusting people he didn’t know so absolutely, but what choice did he have?
The last few miles descended through a heart-in-mouth series of switchbacks toward the town of Phuntsholing. They were beyond exhausted at this point, having been on the road for what amounted to thirty-six hours, plus breaks, and having slept badly in the cars. Rye was starving. There were only so many protein bars you could eat before your stomach rebelled, so the plan was to find a hotel, rest up, eat, and move out fresh in the morning. But even that was optimistic.
It took another hour, with traffic of mainly VW camper vans overflowing with people and luggage backed halfway up the hillside, and what felt like a thousand-meter decline, before the flat plains of Phuntsholing opened up before them. They crawled on, a few precious feet at a time. The plains were called the Duars, a mangling of the original Doors, as in the Doors to the Himalayas, and the view, even with the endless snake of cars through the middle of it, was nothing short of spectacular.
They’d been operating under the assumption that they were ahead of the enemy, and that whoever Cressida really was, she had no choice but to give chase. That was predicated upon the fact that they’d left Kathmandu ahead of any pursuit. But that was false logic because the limited border crossings made them predictable, even without knowing their destination beyond the mountains. If she was somehow connected to the Brotherhood of Dzyan and its devotees that had already tried to kill them more than once, then she knew their destination better than they did, and that took the guesswork out of where they would cross the border and made intercepting them a simple case of mathematics. They could only travel so fast in the ever-changing conditions, even if they spelled each other with the driving. Meaning the biggest risk of ambush was this side of the gate. And that had them all on edge. Watchful.
“I’m tired of being the gazelle,” the big man said out of nowhere. “It’s time to think like the leopard. Do you trust me?”
He didn’t have to think about his answer.
“Implicitly.”
“That helps. We know they are looking for us. We have an idea why, but in truth we’re just running blind. We’ve done this entire journey with one eye on the mirror to see if there’s anyone back there. We know they’re coming. I want to draw them out.”
“And that involves my trust how?”
“I’m thinking we use you as bait.”
“Never a word a guy wants to hear.”
“We put you out there in public, make a show of the fact you are on your own, and see how long it takes for them to bite.”
“Simple enough. Not too many moving parts. So, million-dollar question: What happens if it goes wrong?”
“We’ll be watching,” he promised.
“Watching?”
“From a safe distance. But you’ll be on your own out there. We can’t risk any sort of signal they could track or register on a bug sweep, nothing that might give away the fact it’s a setup.” Which made sense. It wasn’t reassuring, but it made sense.
“What could possibly go wrong?” Rye said.
“Plenty,” the big man said truthfully. “You’ll just have to trust me when I say I won’t let it.”
“Okay. So, what are you thinking?”
“You have a gift for getting in trouble,” Vic said, offering a smile to take the sting out of the words. “We find somewhere to stay, then you go sightseeing, maybe grab some food, sit out in the park, wander around a temple, just be very visibly alone and very much in public, not hidden away in hotel bars. I want you on the street. There aren’t going to be many tourists here, so with luck you’ll stand out like a sore thumb.”
“With you. We paint a target on my back.” Rye nodded. “And what if they don’t bite?”
“Then we push on across the border. But they’re going to make a move. Trust me. They have to. They know we’re getting closer to whatever it is they don’t want us to find. That’s going in our favor. They don’t want us making it to their mountain. The trail of bodies they left trying to stop us getting our hands on that map proves that.” It was sound logic, but there was a body-shaped hole right in the middle of it. His body.
“How do
we know they won’t just take me out as soon as they see they’ve got a shot?”
“We don’t, but we have to assume if they wanted to kill you your paramour could have done it easily enough when you were asleep beside her.” He had a good point, but it was one that was dependent upon the idea that Cressida Mohr was part of some grander conspiracy and not just a liar who made a game out of fucking tourists. “And strategically speaking, if they’re trying to stop us from getting to their mountain, they want to do it here, as far away from it as possible, in case something goes wrong. The closer we get to the mountain, the less room they have to maneuver.”
“I think it’s a great idea,” Byrne said across the airways. Rye had completely forgotten the other man was listening in. “Think of it like a team-building exercise, you know, a trust fall. You let yourself go, rely on the other guys to catch you.”
“And if they don’t?”
“I’ll have eyes on you, don’t worry. I’ll reposition the satellite on Phuntsholing. Don’t worry. We’ve got this.”
“If you keep saying don’t worry it’s going to have the opposite effect. Okay, I’m in. Just do me a favor, try not to get the new boy killed.”
The crossing was on the northern edge of the town.
It was essentially a long wall with a single gateway that looked very much like one of the many Tibetan shrines he’d seen in the monkey temple. It was guarded by soldiers in two different uniforms, and locals seemed to be passing beneath without even showing identification. The difference between the divided city was stark: on one side it seemed vibrant and full of life, with shoppers bustling around, while on the other it was more urban, with the buildings appearing to be homes rather than havens of commerce. The Bhutan side of the gate was considerably quieter, with fewer cars on the roads. From their approach, a single road snaked up the hill on the far side of the city. It was the road to Thimphu, the capital.
They found lodging, avoiding the luxury that marked their previous hotels. It was a small deceit, but if their hunters were looking at past behavior to predict future choices, it was the kind of small deceit that might just buy the few precious seconds that made all the difference.
At only a thousand feet above sea level, the air was normal, if incredibly fresh in Rye’s lungs. The lack of pollutants almost made it harder to breathe, not easier, so conditioned was he to the impurities of city life. He found a street vendor selling momo, pale white dumplings stuffed with so many spices his mouth exploded with the flavors as he bit down into them. He dipped the momo in chutney as he sat in the park in the heart of the town center. A couple in their eighties sat on the bench facing him, alternatively feeding the birds and themselves with mouthfuls of momo. They were so obviously in love Rye couldn’t help but smile. It was good to be out in the fresh air after so many hours cramped in the car, even if he was being dangled like a big juicy worm on a hook. The park itself was incredibly peaceful. Across the way he saw monks walk in and out of their temple. His mind flashed back to the burning man falling to his knees, dead before his body could understand the full extent of what was happening to it. These men, by contrast, seemed so utterly at peace with the world.
On the far side of the park were market stalls, where the locals went about their daily shopping. He heard voices haggling and amused laughter. He heard what he took to be the stall holders trying to entice custom with outrageous promises about their wares.
Rye watched them, eating his momo and smiling as another elderly couple walked up the temple steps to spin the prayer wheel. He wondered what they were wishing for.
While he sat there, a pigeon settled near his feet. Then another. He broke up one of the momos with his fingers and scattered the crumbs for the birds to eat. Within a minute there were a hundred birds crowding around. And then a hundred more. He scattered his last momo and watched them fight over the scraps with unexpected savagery. In the sky he saw easily another thousand black specks as more birds circled the park.
He used the birds as an excuse to look around, trying to make out where the others were. But they were good. He had no idea where they were hiding.
Rye walked back toward the hotel.
As he entered one of the narrower alleyways across the street from the lush greens and bright blossoms of the park, he caught a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision, which on any other day he would have dismissed as nothing, but already on edge, he looked and realized just how much trouble he was in.
Rye reached up to activate the bud in his ear, only to realize it was on the bamboo nightstand back in the seedy hotel room.
A car—a rusted old Ford with a broken headlight and busted radiator grille—blocked the alleyway. There were three men in it; another appeared to be an Indian border guard leaning in to talk to the driver through the open window—no doubt telling him he couldn’t loiter there. There was a suppressed whump of sound followed by the guard’s sudden lurch upright, hand reaching out to the open window for support as his legs betrayed him. The guard fell, a bloodred rose flowering in the center of his chest.
The driver had seen Rye, as had his companions in the car.
He backed up a step but couldn’t look away as the driver opened the door and clambered out. The driver stood over the guard while he bled out. There was nothing rushed about his manner. He knelt beside the fallen man, put his hand over his mouth, and clamped finger and thumb across his nose, hastening his demise. The guard’s body barely bucked, his left leg kicking twice at the ground before the life went out of him.
The driver watched Rye while he killed the man.
Rye turned, knowing he had to get out of the confines of the alley, and fast, only to see a fourth man blocking the way.
He couldn’t see Vic or the others, and the overhanging rooftops obscured at least a portion of the street from the sky.
He’d been stupid.
Stupid got you killed.
The fourth man read his mind and aimed the Uzi at the middle of his chest.
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” he said in perfect English. “Get down. On your knees. Hands behind your head.”
With no other way out of the alley, he had no choice but to do as he was told.
Rye shook his head. “No.”
That threw his attacker. “Don’t make me hurt you.”
“In about thirty seconds I’ll be saying the same thing to you,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel.
“I don’t think so,” a voice said, behind him.
Rye didn’t turn to see who it was. He took a side step toward the alley wall, trying to put something solid behind him, still unable to take his eyes off the Uzi.
“Down,” the gunman repeated, his patience wearing thin.
“Fifteen seconds,” Rye said, hoping to hell that the others were out there.
He felt a crunching hammer blow to his kidneys and dropped to his knees.
“Hands behind your head,” the gunman repeated, jabbing the muzzle of the Uzi at his face.
“Ten,” Rye said, interlacing his fingers behind his head, and continued the countdown. “Nine.”
He clung to the belief that if they wanted him dead, he’d be dead by now.
What he tried not to think about was that sometimes dead was better.
“Eight.”
“You’re a funny man,” the gunman said. As far as last words went, they weren’t the most profound. They didn’t offer him any insight into himself that he didn’t already know. Before Rye could say “Seven,” the man’s jaw exploded in a spray of blood and bone.
“Guess I was wrong,” Rye said, the dead man’s blood on his face as he turned to look at the driver. “He didn’t live long enough to beg. Now, where were we?”
“Seven,” Carter Vickers said helpfully, walking into the mouth of the alleyway.
“Seven,” Rye said, nodding. “Good number.”
The driver dropped to his knees. The two other men did the same. Neither had said a word. They were locals, he re
alized, looking at them properly for the first time. There was no guarantee they even spoke his language. Still, violence was universal. The two men had absolutely no loyalty to the driver that hadn’t been paid for with his rupees, and whatever it had cost, it was pretty much spent now. Rupees didn’t buy the kind of loyalty that left half of your jaw splattered across an alleyway.
“I want to hear you say it,” Carter told Rye.
“Okay, just for you.” Rye turned to the driver. “Don’t make me hurt you.”
“Nice,” the thief said approvingly. “Got some gravitas going on there, man. I’m impressed. I completely believe you’d hurt him, and you know, it sounds like you might even enjoy it. You’ll fit in nicely. Say something else. Say, give me an excuse. Go on, give me an excuse. Make trigger fingers like you’re going to put a bullet in his temple.”
“I’m not saying that,” Rye said.
“You don’t have to pull the actual trigger,” he said helpfully. “And it’s not as though he’s innocent. There’s a dead guard over there. That’s on him. He’s a man of the world, he knows he’s not walking away from this. All we’ve got to do is keep him here until the rest of the guards show up and they’ll pull the trigger for us.”
FORTY-SIX
The first thing Rye heard when he put his earbud back in place was Byrne’s warning, “You’ve got company coming in fast. Another unit of four, coming two by two. They should be with you in under a minute.”