by Barry Eisler
“Is that really all you’re going to let me do?”
“Is that all? If you won’t do it, we’re dead in the water.”
Fallon smiled. “Well, if you put it that way.”
“Hold it up for a second. I want to take a picture of the recent call history. And then let’s turn it off again. Until nine o’clock. Just like Leekpai was supposed to.”
Fallon held up Leekpai’s phone. Livia snapped a photo using hers. “Say the passcode again,” she said. “To make sure we remember.”
Fallon said it instantly, then added, “But I don’t mind you suggesting it. And it was nice of you to say ‘we’ instead of ‘you.’”
She stared at Leekpai. He glanced at her, then at Fallon, then at Carl, then back to her, seeking some sign of hope.
Livia held his gaze. “Anyone have any other questions?”
No one spoke.
She kept her eyes on Leekpai. “Could you guys give us a minute alone?”
In her peripheral vision, she saw them exchange a look. Then they moved away. She heard the sliding door open, then close.
A moment passed. The interior of the van was silent. Leekpai began to cry.
There was some extra plastic sheeting on the seat. Livia squatted alongside him and gathered it up. Leekpai watched her. He started babbling in Thai, faster and faster.
“Shh,” Livia said, feeling the dragon fill her. Suffuse her. Become her.
She continued to shh him. Finally, the babbling stopped. The only sound was of his terrified breathing.
She clenched her jaw and started to cry. “She was eleven,” she said in Thai. “Eleven.”
Leekpai shook his head frantically and screamed, “Mai! Mai! Maaaaiiiii!” He kicked and bucked and struggled against the duct tape.
Livia planted a knee into his chest and whipped the sheeting across his face, wrapping it around and around and around his head until he was mummified in plastic and his screams were muted and indistinct. He twisted and thrashed for a while longer. Then the muffled screaming faded. The twisting and thrashing became no more than a periodic twitch. And soon, even that had ended, and Leekpai lay completely still.
The dragon folded its wings, but her lungs still felt hot with its fire.
She looked at him for a moment longer, nodding to herself. It was good that he was dead. For what he had done, and for what he would now never be able to do again. But overall, she felt just . . . tired. And vaguely empty.
Maybe it was because in the end, Leekpai was a nothing. The one she wanted, needed, was Sorm.
And they were so close now.
28
The three of them dumped Leekpai’s body in a drainage canal, got rid of the plastic elsewhere, and then stopped at a convenience store, where they bought bleach and paper towels and wiped down the interior of the van. Dox was glad Fallon didn’t say anything about Leekpai. It was obviously personal to Labee, and Fallon either respected that, or understood they had to kill a prisoner for the sake of their mission, or more likely both.
When the van was clean, Fallon drove them back to Best Friend Bar 10, where they had parked the Kawasaki. Fallon had Leekpai’s phone. Dox had Leekpai’s wallet, and would shortly dump it in a sewer. They’d checked him, and there was nothing else by which the body might quickly be identified.
Fallon pulled over to the curb and left the engine idling. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “I’ll keep his phone off until nine, and I’ll make sure I’m near the Night Market when I turn it on. In case anyone’s monitoring its location.” He smiled at Labee. “Not that you were going to remind me.”
Labee returned the smile and shook his hand. “Don’t forget to keep yours off until then, too. And thank you.”
“We owe you, amigo,” Dox said.
Fallon shook his head. “Nah. I was getting bored doing odd jobs for Kanezaki anyway. Just buy me a Singha sometime. Semper fi.”
They shook. Dox and Labee got out of the van and Fallon pulled away.
The two of them rode east out of the city center until they were on quiet roads. After a while, they came upon a little open-air roadside restaurant. They ordered a late lunch of hot-and-sour soup and chicken stir fried with sliced ginger over rice. They didn’t talk about Leekpai. In fact, Dox was barely thinking of him. He was still trying to figure out what was bugging him about their intel.
Labee must have seen something in his face, because she said, “What is it?”
He looked at her. “Do you trust me?”
For a moment, it looked as though she would say something. But then she didn’t. She just nodded.
“I want you to tell me about these leads of yours.”
Her head retracted as though he’d raised a hand to her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not doubting you. Or asking for proof. Or anything like that. You know I believe in you, Labee. I told you that.”
“Then what?”
“You said my instincts have always been sound before. Well, maybe so. But something is wrong here. My gut is telling me so. But I can’t figure out what it is. I thought it was K., but that ain’t it, he’s on the level, you persuaded me. But something’s still off. And I need to see the whole picture to understand what it is. If I don’t know what you were up to before we ran into each other—how you got that Glock, how you learned Sorm was supposed to be at Les Nuits, how you learned about the Sorm-Leekpai-Night-Market connection—if I don’t know those things, I can’t see the battlefield the way the enemy does. Meaning I can’t anticipate him. And that means the one who’s going to get anticipated is me. Us.”
He waited. All he could do was hope she’d come to trust him enough to tell him what he needed to know.
When she finally spoke, she didn’t look at him. “There are things about me,” she said. “And I don’t want you to know them.”
Lord, what just those two short sentences seemed to cost her. And how much trust it took to enable her to say so little.
“Hey,” he said, but still she wouldn’t look at him.
“I know you don’t much care to be touched,” he said. “But would it be all right if I just put my hand on yours for a minute?”
She didn’t answer, but her hand was on the table and she didn’t move it, so he decided the answer was yes. He reached out and looped his fingers loosely around hers.
“There is nothing I would ever judge you for,” he said. “Nothing. I have some notion of what you’ve been through in your life. And I don’t want to pry into any of it. All I want to do right now is kill anyone who ever hurt you.”
Still she didn’t look at him. But she tightened her fingers around his.
“I would never ask,” he said. “Because, among other reasons, I already know everything about you I need to.”
He saw she wasn’t looking at him because her eyes had filled up. He wished he could have put his arms around her. But that was his way, not hers.
“But you know why I’m asking you now. Something’s off about our intel, and I can’t figure out what it is if I don’t know how you uncovered the trail that led you to Pattaya.”
After a moment, she pulled back her fingers. She turned her head farther away and tilted her face down and he saw she was blinking away tears. Then, still looking away from him, she told him a horrific, harrowing story about how she and her sister were kidnapped at only thirteen and eleven, sold by their parents. How they were taken on a cargo ship from Bangkok to Portland by three of the kidnappers, men she called Skull Face and Square Head and Dirty Beard, obviously the way she had conceived of them as a child. She told him the men had threatened to rape Nason, and that Labee had tried to prevent them by “doing what the men wanted” in Nason’s stead. She didn’t give details about what that meant. She didn’t need to.
She told him that of course the men had been lying, and that when they tired of Labee, they tried to take Nason. Labee had attacked them and sliced open the eye of the leader, Skull Face. The men had retaliated by raping Nason
so savagely that her sister was left catatonic. Meaning that Labee’s efforts to protect her sister had probably been the very thing that doomed her.
She stared off while she told him all this, crying steadily and silently and without visible emotion beyond the tears themselves.
She told him how she had spent sixteen years not even knowing whether Nason was alive or dead. She was given the name Livia by a man who purported to “rescue” her—a man who was actually behind the sisters’ abduction. She killed that man. She escaped his house. She became a cop. She tracked down the men who had taken them. It turned out they were all with the Royal Thai Police. She learned they had killed Nason years earlier. In a Bangkok hotel room, she killed Skull Face and two others who had been part of the conspiracy. A US senator—the brother of the man who had “rescued” her. And the senator’s bodyguard/bagman.
She had used Special Agent Little’s offer of a joint anti-trafficking task force as an excuse to return to Thailand to finish off the others. She had smothered Square Head with a pillow, but not before getting numbers from his cell-phone address book—numbers that enabled her to track Dirty Beard. Dirty Beard had thought to ambush her, showing up with two other cops, all armed with Glocks and equipped with night vision. She had taken their guns and killed them all. Dirty Beard had told her about Les Nuits. And about the Night Market, a contact there named Leekpai, who sold children.
And she told him one more thing. There was a girl in the senator’s hotel room. The one she’d been asking Leekpai about in the van. A little girl of about Nason’s age at the time they were taken. The senator had been raping her when Labee showed up and had his man take her away because Labee, a treasure from the past, seemed more interesting. Labee had been at gunpoint, helpless, as they led the sobbing girl away. And the girl had looked at Labee with beseeching, agonized eyes. And Labee didn’t help her. She couldn’t. She had been helpless herself. And she couldn’t stop thinking of that girl. She had to find her. Protect her. She had to. She had to.
By the time she was finished, his own eyes were wet. Not just because of what she’d been through. But because of what it had obviously cost her to relate it to him.
They sat silently afterward, Labee looking out into the distance. “I’ve never talked about any of that with anyone,” she said after a while, her tone flat. “Never.”
“I’m sorry for making you.”
She didn’t answer.
“Labee, I’m sorry again, but I need to ask you one more question.”
Again she didn’t answer.
“You say you took the guns off Dirty Beard and his two partners and killed them all. But . . . it sounds like you interrogated them first. Or at least Dirty Beard.”
She turned and looked at him.
“I made you cry,” she said, again with that flat tone.
“It’s not as hard as you might think, but yes.”
There was a pause. She said, “I shot the first two. Dirty Beard I handcuffed and drove to a quarry, along with the bodies of the others. That’s where I interrogated him. And then I burned all of them.”
Dox couldn’t help thinking, Remind me never to get on your bad side. But he certainly didn’t say it.
“Now you know about me,” she said. “What I am.”
That nearly made him cry again. “What you are is the bravest person I’ve ever known. I’m sorry if that sounds condescending, but it’s the truth.”
She looked away. “I’m tired.”
“How could you not be?”
“Can you see the battlefield now?”
“Better than I could. Let me think a minute. The two you shot . . . well, Sorm or DIA or whoever might have thought that was my doing. Using what I got from K. to work my way into Sorm’s network and develop the intel that led me to Pattaya. But the third guy, Dirty Beard. Burning him to death . . . I want you to know, if I’d been there, I would have poured the gasoline myself. But that’s not what matters. What matters is, in my many years in this business, I think it’s safe to say I’ve become known more for bullets than for burning, so what happened to Dirty Beard isn’t going to look like something I would have done. It’s too personal. And depending on what else they know, they might decide it looks like you.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning . . . I’m not sure. But I’ll tell you what. I’m getting the sense old Dillon has a real knack for figuring out what other people know. And then feeding them something new that fits with it so they think they’re developing their own intel and coming to their own conclusions, when in fact whatever they come up with he’s effectively planted in their minds. That’s what he did to Kanezaki with the ambush in Pattaya. And I can feel him doing it again now. I mean, he’s using a communications channel he knows is compromised to talk about how he’s meeting Sorm at the Night Market. Why would he do that? Maybe we’d just buy it and act accordingly, sure. But . . . that doesn’t feel like his style. I feel like he fed us the Night Market because he knew we already had something pointing in that direction. And sure, he’s being oblique with ‘the tents’ and all, but that’s just theater. He’d know if we were already dialed into the Night Market, we’d put two and two together and congratulate ourselves for being so uncommonly clever. We’d walk away feeling like we’d figured it all out and had corroboration for the new intel. But in fact, all we have is a damn fabrication.”
She nodded slowly. She looked exhausted. Shell-shocked. He hated that he’d made her tell him what she did. But he also knew there was no other way.
“I see your point,” she said. “But it depends on whether Sorm knows, or believes, the one who killed Square Head, and Dirty Beard and his partners, was me.”
“Well, look at it this way. Sorm knows all those guys. Works with them. I mean, you said you used Dirty Beard’s phone to track him to Pattaya, where he was delivering cash to Sorm.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. And according to this guy Square Head, Dirty Beard tried to warn them that you were coming, that it must have been you who killed Skull Face and the others two months ago here in Bangkok. Right?”
She hadn’t given him details about how she’d killed Skull Face and the others. But given that she’d burned alive old Dirty Beard, he could imagine. Also, when she’d said those names in Fallon’s van by way of introducing herself, Leekpai seemed to know exactly to whom and what she was referring, and it obviously terrified him. Anyway, he guessed it was the extremely personal manner in which Skull Face and company had been killed, as much as anything else, that would have signaled to the rest of the gang the killer was Labee.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s true.”
“And then Dirty Beard gets killed himself, burned to death. Sorm hears about it from his buddies on the force. I mean, how could he not make the connection? And how could he not assume Dirty Beard would have given up a lot before he died? Information about the Night Market. And this guy Leekpai, who sells kids there. Probably that’s why Leekpai had bodyguards when we got him. Wish I’d thought of it sooner, but okay, no harm, no foul.”
There was a pause. “You’re right,” she said. “I should have . . . I’m just too close to it. I’m too . . . tired.”
“You are close to it. But the real problem is, we haven’t been putting our heads together. Not like we’ve needed to. Now we are.”
She nodded. “So Sorm knows I’m here. He warns Leekpai. And he tells Dillon you and I are working together, or at least in parallel. And probably the first, because—”
“Because how the hell else did I walk away from the ambush in Pattaya if I didn’t have a partner like you?”
She looked at him. “The night vision,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Dirty Beard and his men were using dual night vision and infrared. State of the art. I wondered at the time where they were getting equipment like that. Even police departments in the States don’t have it. As far as I know, it’s exclusively US military. And export-licens
e controlled.”
“Well, you certainly could get it from DIA. Under the table, anyway.”
“Exactly.”
“What the hell is Sorm trading for that kind of gear?”
For a while, neither of them spoke, and the only sound was of insects in the surrounding vegetation. Dox finished his soup. Labee stared out into the distance. A couple of motorbikes buzzed past, two and three riders apiece, the girls in back sitting sidesaddle. Dox shook his head and thought, That far I am not willing to go.
Labee turned to him. She gave him one of those small, sad smiles.
“So we’re partners?”
He held out his hand. “Hell yes, we’re partners. And friends.”
She hesitated, then took his hand. She squeezed it hard and held it for a moment before she let go.
“You’re right,” she said. “About what Sorm would know. And therefore about what Dillon would know. I see it now. You would have made a hell of a cop.”
He shook his head. “Not half as good as you.”
He thought for a moment. “Now that we’ve got some additional insight, I see we might have ourselves something of a conundrum about the Night Market.”
“What’s that?”
“What if the police figure out Leekpai’s been taken? Half of them are on Sorm’s payroll. They’ll warn him.”
“I’m not so worried about that.”
“Tell me. I’d prefer not to be worried myself.”
“A lot of reasons. The initial hours of an investigation are almost always chaotic. Witness accounts will be confused and contradictory. Whatever happened, it happened at the port, so it could be drugs, it could be anything. Will the cops know to associate the victims with Leekpai? And even if they do figure things out that fast, Sorm’s phone is off. They can’t warn him. I doubt they would know where to find him, either, because as much as they conspire with him, would he really share the details of his activities? And even if they do figure things out incredibly fast, and even if they do have a way to reach Sorm, and even if they do warn him about Leekpai, our worst case is he aborts.”