by Barry Eisler
“That’s the Genocide Museum today.”
“Correct.”
“This Comrade Douche, when they tried him, he implicated Sorm?”
“Correct again. It turned out Sorm was even worse than we knew. It wasn’t just torture and murder. His specialty was sexual humiliation and rape—male, female, young, old. He would rape parents in front of their children. Children in front of their parents. Nothing was too grotesque for him.”
“My lord.”
“Yes. Imagine what it would take to distinguish yourself during five years of genocide on grounds of cruelty and sadism.”
“But apparently he wasn’t distinguished enough to frighten away the intelligence ‘community.’”
“Listen, my friend, you’re no choirboy yourself. You know that the best intel, maybe even the only truly worthwhile intel, comes from bad people. And Sorm definitely had a lot of intel goodies to offer. His contacts were extensive, he was a great access agent, and his knowledge of what was going on in various Southeast Asian separatist groups and insurgencies was invaluable. But still, there are limits. When we learned from Comrade Duch’s testimony just how bad Sorm really was, we stopped using him.”
Dox laughed. “You make it sound like principle, not public relations.”
“I wasn’t there at the time and it wasn’t my call, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be both.”
“I suppose. Call me a cynic if you like.”
“Anyway. If the guy with Vann really was US intelligence, someone’s going to claim him.”
“Can you find out? I could contact the buddy who put me in touch with Gant in the first place, but I doubt he’d know anything himself. And besides, seeing how this whole op was supposed to end with me out of the picture, I’m not feeling especially trustful just now toward anyone who helped bring me into it.”
“You think Rain could have set you up? I can’t imagine him doing that.”
Dox was horrified. “No, no, I’m talking about someone else, fellow marine from back in the day. Rain would never.”
“Well, that was my sense, too, but you had me worried for a minute.”
Dox snorted. If a man like Rain were after you, worrying would be nothing but a waste of time. Getting your affairs in order, and fast, would be more like it.
“Anyway,” Dox said. “My marine buddy is a good man, but in the end a knuckle dragger without your remarkable access and keen insights.”
“Now you’re just trying to flatter me.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s untrue. You’re a division chief now, right? East Asia?”
“I am, though it took seventeen years to get here.”
“Long enough to know where a few bodies are buried, I reckon. And where to go looking for the others.”
He was expecting more protestations about how difficult and complicated it would be to find out more about Gant. So he was pleasantly surprised when Kanezaki said simply, “I’ve got a hunch. Let me follow up on it.”
“A hunch?”
“Let’s just say that not all the members of the US intelligence community have the same principles—or the same public-relations concerns—as CIA.”
Dox smiled. “Well, I guess they don’t call you Christians in Action for nothing. Or at least let’s hope they don’t.”
3
Livia grabbed a cold pack for Little’s elbow from the first-aid room, then led him to the tenth-floor cafeteria. It was late for lunch, and the room was mostly empty. Little bought coffee for himself and the mineral water Livia had requested, and they sat at a table overlooking Fifth Avenue, the outside traffic muted by the modern building’s thick glass. In the distance, the waters of Elliott Bay sparkled under a clear blue sky. Livia was glad she’d ridden the Ducati that morning—a Streetfighter, and the fastest, best-balanced bike she’d ever owned. Maybe later she’d ride out to Alki Beach before heading home to her industrial loft in Georgetown. It had been a bad, wet winter, made bleaker by what she’d had to face from her past. But summer was here now, the darkness retreating, the days getting luxuriously longer, and she’d told herself the past was done. She’d faced it. And this time, buried it. Literally, in the case of poor Nason.
But watching Little as he carefully added cream and sugar to his coffee, slowly stirring it like a chef preparing a contest soufflé, she was suddenly uncertain. This couldn’t be about Bangkok. But then why the surprise visit? Why the ostentatiously long devotions to his coffee, a show of relaxed confidence she knew was another attempt to draw her out with silence?
Maybe it was just habit. Well, she would have more information soon enough. In the meantime, the best move was to simply outwait him.
When Little was satisfied with his preparations, he lifted the cup and took a sip. “Damn, that is some fine coffee,” he said, nodding in appreciation. “Seattle, where even police coffee is gourmet.”
“You put enough cream and sugar in, I imagine you could be drinking anything,” Livia said, though the truth was, she took her own coffee with a generous helping of milk and turbinado sugar. It tasted like her time with Rick, the adoptive uncle who had rescued her from horrors and who was one of the reasons she became a cop.
He smiled. “Well, I guess that’s fair. Maybe I should have tasted it first, before sweetening it.”
“Or maybe you just like to sugarcoat things.”
That made him laugh. “I guess that depends on the topic.”
That was a cue for her to ask what the topic was. But again she waited.
He took another sip of coffee. “You know, Livia, I don’t want to show my cards until I’m sure you’re in. But I guess you can’t agree to be in until you’ve seen at least some of the cards I’m holding. So we’re a bit stuck here.”
“Really? I don’t feel stuck at all.”
He laughed again. “They said you’d be tough, and you’re not disappointing me. How about this? Let me ask you a few preliminary questions. If you like my questions, and I like your answers, we’ll take this a little further. If not, I’ll thank you for the martial-arts lesson, you thank me for the mineral water, and life goes on.”
“Works for me.”
“Good. I hope you appreciate that I haven’t been trying to hide how I’ve checked up on you. I’ve read your personnel file. Talked to your superiors. Read the results of your background check, your psych profile, everything. And same as for a good book, obviously I wouldn’t have kept reading if I didn’t like the story.”
Having a federal agent dig into your past would be uncomfortable for anyone. For her it was worse. But for the moment, the only way she could respond would be with questions. And questions, she knew, could sometimes reveal as much as answers. So she said nothing.
“So here’s the skinny,” he went on. “If there’s one thing everyone agrees on regarding Livia Lone, it’s this: intensity. Straight-A student. State champion wrestler—and not in a girls’ league, either, that was against boys.”
For the second time, she thought she saw that odd look pass across his face. She didn’t know what it meant.
“And then Olympic alternate with the judo team at San Jose State,” he went on. “Top of your class at the academy. And your arrest-and-conviction record is off the charts.”
Again she said nothing.
“But that’s all just the what,” he said. “The what is always right out in the open. I want to know why.”
It seemed a harmless-enough inquiry. Which made her suspect it.
“What do you mean?”
“I hope you’re not going to tell me you just want to serve and protect. I’m sure that’s part of it, and I’m sure it’s noble. But I’m also sure it’s not what gets you out of bed in the morning, or the middle of the night, for that matter, and makes you the great cop you are.”
“You want to know what makes a great cop?”
“I want to know what makes you a great cop.”
“The answer’s the same. Compassion.”
�
�All right. But where does all that compassion come from?”
She didn’t like what he seemed to be implying. And what maybe he knew. “From being human.”
“Human. Okay, I can see that. But people say you’re like a warrior monk. A crusader. No interests, no hobbies, no life, beyond putting away rapists.”
“You make it sound like putting away rapists is a bad thing.”
“No, not at all. Like I said, just trying to figure out where it comes from.”
“Got something to write with? Because it’s complicated.”
“Try me.”
“I prefer rapists to be in prison. Is it not the same for you?”
Actually, she preferred them to be dead, but life was full of compromises.
“You’re deflecting. I’m talking about what sounds like an obsession.”
“You think I care too much?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe the problem is that people like you care too little.”
She was getting tired of the dance. But she wasn’t going to reveal more until he did. She knew she had more leverage. He was the one who had come all the way out here from DC or wherever. Who obviously had spent a lot of time evaluating her. He’d open up. All she had to do was outlast him.
“Oh, you’d be surprised at how much I care,” he said, and for an instant she thought she detected genuine emotion in his tone. “And in fact, your singular focus is something I admire. But I still want to understand it.”
In admire, she heard want to use. In understand, she heard exploit.
“Here’s the thing,” he went on. “Nobody seems to know about your past. It only goes as far back as your uncle—Rick Harris, in Portland, when you were finishing high school.”
Only a lifetime of keeping secrets enabled her to conceal her discomfort at what she recognized as an interrogator’s gambit—a direct probe into a likely sensitive area to elicit and evaluate a response.
The truth was, she knew SPD hadn’t looked that deeply into her background. They’d talked to her professors and judo coach at San Jose State, of course, and received glowing recommendations. And they’d contacted Rick, who had told them how he’d taken in Livia after Rick’s brother-in-law Fred Lone’s heart attack. Rick was a hero with the Portland Police Bureau—a homicide detective with multiple decorations for valor—so his imprimatur was golden. Beyond which, SPD had wanted her badly: minority woman, straight-A student, collegiate judo star, and criminal-justice major made for an attractive combination. They didn’t know that Livia had once been Labee.
“In fact,” Little went on, “to the extent anyone is even aware of your past, there’s a notion that you were some kind of boat person or other refugee, and the Lones adopted you. Not so unusual—Asian babies get adopted by white families all the time. Hell, some people think Lone is a Chinese name and you’re not adopted at all, you’re just Chinese American. The point is, no one really seems to know.”
Was he threatening to tell people about her past? Why would he think—why would he know—this would make her uncomfortable? And did he know more than he was letting on—not just about her past, but maybe about her present, too?
But no, she was falling for another interrogator’s trick, and a basic one: suggesting you knew more than you did, so the subject would feel he wasn’t giving you anything you didn’t already have. It helped to know the routine, though obviously knowing it wasn’t a foolproof defense when you found yourself on the other end.
She gave him a long, bored look. “If they don’t know,” she said, “maybe it’s because they don’t care.”
“Or it could be they don’t care because they don’t know. About your sister, I mean. About how you were both trafficked, and separated. How she wound up in a potter’s field all the way in Maryland. I’m sorry for that, Livia. Truly sorry.”
His use of Nason as some sort of elicitation tool was worse than offensive. It made her want to hurt him. A vestigial instinct, she knew. Nason was long since beyond protecting, but the instinct was inextinguishable, like the pain of a phantom limb. A limb Little was now deliberately prodding.
And he knew Nason had been buried in Maryland. It had taken Livia sixteen years and one dead rapist senator to learn that. Her initial, presumably paranoid suspicion that this visit was about Bangkok rekindled. Probably his next ploy would be to ask how she had learned what had happened to Nason and where she had been buried.
But instead, he said, “Is that where the intensity comes from? Childhood trauma?”
She took a sip of mineral water, deliberately casual. “If it makes you happy. I hate to think of the resources you spent on all this background. You could have just asked me.”
“Well, that’s the thing about the federal government. We have so many resources to waste.”
“Look, it sounds like you already know everything about me. The what and the why. Or you think you do, anyway. While I still know virtually nothing about you. Is that the way you’re going to play this? If so, you’ll have to find someone else to psychoanalyze. I’ve got cases I need to get back to.”
“You feel I’ve been trying to psychoanalyze you?”
She finished the mineral water and set down the bottle. “Reflecting the subject’s words to encourage him to talk was one of the first things I learned about interviews. If I were stupid enough to fall for it, you probably wouldn’t want to work with me. And if you’re stupid enough to think I’d fall for it, I don’t want to work with you.”
He laughed and held up his hands, palms forward. “Okay, fair point. Enough fucking around, I guess. You’re right, I think I know you. At least I hope I do. Like I said earlier, I just had to see for myself.”
He cleared his throat and rubbed his hands together. “So here’s the deal. HSI is trying to bust a trafficking ring in Thailand. We’ve had jack shit worth of success. I want your help.”
So this wasn’t about the senator. At least, probably it wasn’t.
“What kind of trafficking ring?”
“The kind that’s being protected by the Thai government.”
Her heart started thudding in response to an adrenaline hit. Only two months earlier, she had finally learned the name of the leader of the group of men that had come to her childhood village in Thailand like monsters in a fairy tale and taken her and Nason: Chanchai Vivavapit. Chanchai Vivavapit, who, according to his Bangkok Post obituary, had been chief of the Central Investigation Bureau of the Royal Thai Police—the country’s national police force. For sixteen years, she had fantasized about killing the man she had always thought of simply as Skull Face. But when she had finally done it, butchering him along with Senator Lone, who was both Skull Face’s customer and his benefactor, it hadn’t been enough. There were two other men in Skull Face’s gang, men whose names she didn’t yet know but who she still thought of as Square Head and Dirty Beard. And two others—the one who had been in the van, and the one who had whipped that little boy, Kai, in the field—men who had helped with the transit from their village in the mountainous northwest to the port in Bangkok.
And there was that girl. The little girl the senator had raped in his Bangkok hotel room. A girl about the same age Nason had been the last time Livia had seen her.
She would never be able to get that little girl’s face out of her mind. She had beseeched Livia with her agonized eyes as Matthias Redcroft, Lone’s “legislative aide,” had led her, trembling and bleeding, away. And Livia, at gunpoint, had been helpless to do anything but watch.
If she were at all inclined to respond to Little’s questions about her motivations, she knew, grappling with that demon of helplessness would be at the top of the list. Not that knowing the why ever had much impact on the what.
“May I take your silence as evidence of interest?” Little said.
She had been trying not to let it show, but she knew her excitement might have made it to the surface. Still, she said only, “You may take it as evidence that I’m listening.”
&nb
sp; He nodded. “Well, hopefully they’re one and the same. So here it is. Over the last five years, HSI has sent three different agents to liaise with the Royal Thai Police. And yet our investigation has gone precisely nowhere. And this in spite of ample intelligence demonstrating that elements of the national police are intimately involved in every aspect of trafficking to, from, and within Thailand.”
Her mind was screaming with questions, and she fought to push the urge away. This could be the chance she’d been hoping for. To finish the rest of the men who had helped Skull Face. To finally make every last one of them pay.
And even more than that: to find that little girl.
She focused on her breathing for a moment, the way she had always done before a match. When her excitement felt sufficiently in check, she said, “What do you think has been the problem?”
Little shrugged. “A lot of it is just burnout. Emotional exhaustion. The horror of trafficking . . . it’s incomprehensible. It’s natural for the mind to want to turn away from it, to rationalize that it’s just a tragic aspect of a primitive foreign culture, something we Westerners of course disapprove of but are ultimately helpless to change.”
Was he trying to play some kind of ethnic card with her? She said nothing.
“But you wouldn’t do that, Livia, would you? You would never rationalize horror. Habituate to it. You’re the kind of person who could stare horror in the face for the rest of your life and never once blink, isn’t that right?”
“Is that your assessment?”
“Hell yes, it’s my assessment. You want to disagree, go right ahead. But I doubt you’d be able to convince either of us. And look, obviously it’s not just that you’re the kind of cop who doesn’t flinch or turn away. You’re also ethnic Thai. You can blend. Do you still speak the language?”