Off the Edge (The Associates)

by Crane, Carolyn

  Macmillan followed him to the bathroom and was pleased to find a large window that opened easily and silently. “You oiled it.”

  “Months ago. Still glides.”

  The window overlooked a sea of roofs and twisty alleys dotted with colorful awnings that would help conceal an escape route.

  “The fire escape is stable,” Rio said.

  “Good.” Macmillan also appreciated the poor bathroom lighting and a mirror spotted with black where the silvering had oxidized. It meant Laney wouldn’t be able to see her soon-to-be-ugly neck bruises. He wished he could race back to that hotel and rip Rolly apart with his bare hands.

  “This room has a telltale,” Rio said. “A creak that travels from down the hall.” He went out and demonstrated it. Sure enough, you could hear a creak when he was three doors down.

  The window looked out onto a mirrored building across the street; the blue neon sign of an electronics company down the block reflected off it in wavy geometries. The room would be lit blue at night.

  “See the muscle out front?” Rio asked.

  Macmillan moved to the window, staying near the side. He saw who Rio meant—it was the way they loitered down on the sidewalk—too on-the-nose. When real people loitered, they had an almost vegetative quality. Macmillan didn’t like that he hadn’t seen that man. He’d breezed past, absorbed in his tale of woe. That couldn’t happen again.

  Rio stood next to him. “A lot of reasons for a guy like that to be out there. Still.” Food vendors were coming out to set up for lunch down below.

  “Trouble?” Laney got up.

  “Probably not,” Rio said. “Just don’t stand in front of the window.” He pulled the curtains shut and looked Macmillan up and down. “You look terrible. Sit.”

  Macmillan sat as Laney peeked out through a slit in the curtains. Rio pulled medical supplies from a small box. “Take off the wig.” He put a hand to Maxwell’s forehead. “Fever’s gone. For now.” He brushed aside his hair. “Gash the size of Bolivia on your head. Look at this, your hair’s become a pathogen toupee.”

  “I hear they were all the rage during fashion week,” he said as Rio pressed his fingers onto his head, palpating the bump where Dok had bashed his head with brass knuckles. He could feel Laney watching him and not liking that he’d made that joke. She took his pain so seriously. It was a strange feeling.

  “Take off your shirt,” Rio grated.

  Maxwell protested.

  “No time. Do it.” Rio produced a white bottle and a wad of cotton as Maxwell peeled off his shirt.

  Laney gasped.

  Macmillan looked down to see a nasty scrape glowing inside a line of red-pink bruises on his ribs. More bruises bloomed around his arm and shoulder where he’d fallen, some impossibly dark green and yellow. And there were other bruises not as bad, red patches the size of fists with marble-sized dots of red inside them.

  “I’m perfectly fine.”

  “Aside from being all beat up with a gash on your head the size of Bolivia.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “And here I thought you liked a precise word.”

  Rio’s cheeks hardened, as though he was suppressing a smile.

  Macmillan winced as Rio palpated his ribs, heading toward the possibly broken one, finally hitting the spot where the slightest touch felt like a dart of fire.

  “Here? Here?” Rio asked, continuing the torture.

  “Everywhere. Just patch the scrape and we’ll tape all around.”

  Rio gave him a look, because of course it wasn’t just a scrape. He started slathering on the topical all the same. When that was done to his satisfaction, he taped a gauze pad over one of the nastiest of the gashes, then bound his chest; it would at least offer a little support.

  “Now the feet,” Rio said quietly. “We’ll soak them first.”

  They went to the bathroom and ran warm water in the tub. Soaking would be the best way to get the socks off.

  When they were finished cleaning and bandaging his feet, Macmillan eased on the socks and moccasins. He saw his friend to the door and clasped his shoulder. “It’s no small thing, pulling us out of there like that,” he said softly.

  “Just make it right,” Rio said.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Thorne knelt in front of the rusted gate to the stall, fingering the smashed lock. Macmillan had been in a hurry to get himself and the former Mrs. Rolly Jazzman out of sight. But you could never hide, not really.

  He went into the space and found multiple sets of dusty footprints, and he could see where they’d sat behind the crates. It didn’t mean much.

  Yet.

  He stood and took it all in. The dusty case. The pattern of broken cobwebs. The ripped Orangina poster. There was always a clue to be found, even with one fugitive. Two people multiplied the likelihood. Three even more. Other people were a liability, even when they were helping you. One of the reasons Thorne was glad to be a lone wolf.

  Being a lone wolf was especially safer when you operated under deep cover, the way Thorne did. The other Associates had no idea he worked for Dax—that’s how deep his cover went. Technically, he wasn’t even an Associate. He didn’t have a brainy specialty or wear glasses, and his only talent was knocking heads and creating chaos. Definitely not a team player.

  Thorne knelt next to a cigarette butt outside the gate. Judging from the pattern in the dirt, somebody had stood in that spot for a while. The ashes suggested a cigarette held, but not smoked. He picked it up with a tweezers and determined that it had been dropped well after the rains of the night. No way would Macmillan or Mrs. Jazzman have stood in front of their hidey hole, smoking. No, whoever smoked that cigarette was probably a third player. He eyed the windows that looked out onto the sidewalk. Somebody would’ve seen.

  One hour, five busted doors, and twelve frightened people later, Thorne had his description. It was Rio who’d been standing out there, waiting for the coast to clear before pulling them out.

  Gloomy, ruthless, stylish Rio the assassin.

  Even though Thorne wasn’t a proper Associate, he knew all about them. They were like a baseball team he followed from afar; he collected their cards, memorized their stats, and followed their games. He even knew the code they used between them, thanks to Dax: One Associate would say, Nice day for a walk or Nice morning for doughnuts, something along those lines. And then the other would reply, Clears the mind. The exchange was a kind of secret handshake that meant all is well. Not saying one of the two parts was a heads up: SOS. Trouble.

  Thorne sometimes wondered what it would be like to be in a tight group like that with their codes and back-slapping camaraderie, though he understood perfectly why Dax wanted to keep him on his own.

  In the animal world, you had species that were universally despised—Fleas. Cockroaches. Rats. People put a lot of ingenuity into killing them or at least driving them off.

  You had that in the human world, too. All his life people had been trying to figure out how to send him away or else kill him. He’d been putting up with it for so long, he was used to it. In short, he was a natural villain. He fit right in with the guys at the auction.

  And Dax couldn’t have found anybody more suited to infiltrate that group of crazy, fucked-up, dangerous cretins known collectively as Hangman. Hell, even the Hangman guys were wary of him. Thorne was Hangman four now, and he’d be Hangman three soon, and he planned to climb all the way to the top. He didn’t know how; he never knew how he’d do a thing until he did it. His idol, Bruce Lee, always said to be open to every possibility.

  He got Dax on the line. Dax was surprised to hear Rio had been there. Rio should have been on a hit across town during that time frame. Pinned down, Dax thought.

  Dax got over his surprise soon enough and gave him a list of the Bangkok hotels Rio liked. Thorne assured him again he’d take the girl away from Macmillan and hand her off to Dax’s own buyer. It wouldn’t be easy, but Thorne would make it
work; a reputation as a crazy bought you some leeway, that’s for sure.

  No way could the TZ get out—Thorne understood that better than anyone, thanks to his position inside Hangman. In fact, Hangman was possibly the worst group to win the auction. They loved chaos and senseless violence way too much.

  He’d never gone up against one of the Associates, but he’d do what needed to be done, even if Macmillan stood in his way, which he would.

  Macmillan: Cool and smooth, even in a firefight. Always ready with a joke. A shining golden boy, loved by all. Macmillan was everything Thorne could never be.

  Well, he’d fight him all the same.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  After Rio left, Macmillan used his phone to log into his personal cloud storage. Working on this tiny screen would be hell, but he could do it.

  She sat on the bed, feet up, eating. “What’s our plan, Devilwell?”

  “I’m going to work out this problem.” He started copying over his spectrogram software and unwrapped the earbuds Rio had purchased for him. He didn’t need her hearing Rolly’s voice over and over. Though most of his work would be on the screen.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just stay away from the windows.”

  She stretched out on the bed and opened a package of crackers. “Maybe this is a stupid question, but why not just arrest him or kill him or something?”

  “Because he’s an army of one with that weapon, and if he dies, somebody else will control the weapon and be an army of one, and the plans will probably be sent all over. We need the whole package. Just taking Rolly out doesn’t cut it.”

  “And you’re going to try to get control of the weapon? With that phone?”

  He nodded. He’d sure the hell try.

  “How?”

  “I’m going to use Rolly’s voice to break the security on the control system. It uses biometric security. It’s a type of voiceprinting.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “And it’s easy to break?”

  “Normal voiceprinting is. It’s a discredited technology, but this is kind of an advanced form, so it’s a little tougher.”

  “And you can beat it.”

  He could hear the smile in her voice. Don’t look up, he told himself. Getting lost in her again was the last thing he needed. “Yes.”

  “A linguist secret agent. Did you grow up thinking, I want to be so goddamn cool someday?”

  He bit back a smile. “No,” he said.

  She grinned. “You sure about that? Because a linguist secret agent. It’s so Indiana Jones.” She stuffed another cracker into her mouth. “You don’t want any?”

  “No thanks.” Even food could dull that crystal-clear space of intellect he needed to be in. They didn’t have much time.

  “I’ll shut up. You just let me know if I can help.” Her cheeks and forehead shone with sweat and he wanted badly to go to her, to fall into her, to tell her more about the horror of the hand. But that Peter stuff wouldn’t serve her now.

  “I need you to make a list of everywhere you think has a voice recording of Rolly. Anything. Phone messages, mp3 clips.”

  “Got it.” He felt the hairs on his arms raise as she moved close to him, as if she brought her own electricity.

  “What?”

  “Paper and a pen.”

  He opened the little drawer and produced a notepad and paper.

  “I love hotel pads.” She ran her thumbnail over the edge of the pad making a soft thwick. “And then you use a recording of his voice to fool the computer?” she asked.

  “Yes, after a lot of doctoring to make him say what I want him to say.”

  She returned to the bed.

  Getting Rolly’s password would be the easy part. Rio’s phone had just enough CPU to throw at a brute force attack, though he’d have to run it concurrently with the spectrogram processing. So it would take a while.

  The really hard part would be the challenge question—the program would ask a random question, like, what is three plus four? And he’d have to answer seven in Rolly’s voice within a short amount of time.

  He’d use his software to create a library of Rolly’s speech, sliced into the smallest building blocks of language

  First he’d separate individual phonemes, consonants, and vowels. Then he’d have to identify the transitions between sounds. The plosives—P and T and K and their counterparts—would be easiest because they were typically preceded by a few milliseconds of silence—that pause where the flow of air was blocked. He could put any phoneme he wanted before a plosive. The other sounds would be trickier. He’d have to picture how the lips and tongue moved. Tedious work, but necessary for “Rolly” to sound like a person and not a computer.

  Once he had the library set up, he’d integrate it with his home-cooked voice recognition application to help automate things. He’d trained it well—it could understand him whether he was whispering or shouting. He’d say the challenge word in his own voice and it would assemble the sounds for him, synthesizing Rolly’s voice on the other end.

  She finished her list quickly, and it wasn’t much. Phone threats she’d made digital copies of for the divorce case and “asshole things he said while I was recording songs,” as she put it. “Mostly wanting me to be more country western. He always thought I should change my music. I’ve got hours of music with his voice in between songs.”

  “Everybody’s a critic.”

  Laney snorted. “You got that right. So you can pull that stuff off my computer?”

  As it turned out, he could. Laney went off to shower while Macmillan separated and prepared the new samples. The voicemail threats featuring Rolly claiming ownership over her were chilling. You’re mine—forever.

  Macmillan bristled at the words. And then there were the bits of Rolly bellyaching between songs. Bellyaching. Her term.

  Rolly’s passwords were starting to fall. Sports teams combined with 437. Gotcha, Macmillan thought.

  The bellyaches were as short as the threats, unfortunately. Can’t you get a more country-western effect? It was ridiculous, like asking an apple why it doesn’t taste more like an orange.

  But then, he, too, had been hard on her songs.

  It felt good to parse Rolly’s utterances into senseless bits. Still, he needed more recordings of Rolly speaking. There were certain sounds he’d kill to have, like the zh sound borrowed from French—the last g in garage. A voiced post-alveolar fricative, rare in English. Garage as a challenge word would sink him unless he could get that.

  His email icon flashed. His contact had hit a roadblock getting recordings of Rolly’s prison phone calls.

  His heart sank. He would fail this mission without those recordings.

  She came out of the bathroom wearing the blue dress and stockings she’d had on before, her wet hair the only clue she’d showered.

  He wanted nothing more than to go to her and kiss her lips and her warm, clean neck, and confess things to her; it was as if he’d opened a floodgate, telling her about the hand. He wanted to connect with her and unspool with her. Just be with her. He was so tired.

  Dangerous.

  She needed him grim and focused. He examined the differences between two different uh sounds. People thought there were just seven or ten vowel sounds. If only.

  She took up her perch on the bed. “What will you do once you have control of it?”

  “It depends. The general idea is to shut down the weapon, shut down the auction, then worry about the schematics.”

  “No, but, what will you make it do? Will you shoot him with it?”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  “But you could.”

  “That’s a level of control I don’t need. I only have to make it look like it doesn’t work. That’s enough to break up the auction.” He looked up and was struck again by her, just sitting there on the bed with the Bangkok Post spread out on her lap, fanning herself with the hotel pad.

  “But if you shot him with his own weapon, thin
k how poetic it would be,” she said. “Tell me you at least could, so I can enjoy imagining it.”

  He remembered that sort of revenge fantasy—he’d had it with Merodeador. “With the right commands in hand, yes,” he said. “But look, we are using Rolly’s weapons against him. Every word he said on those harassing calls, and every criticism he made of your songs, all of that’s like gold to me.”

  “How long?”

  “We’re far from it.”

  “How far?”

  “Far. And I’m afraid it will be boring for you.”

  “I got a project.” She grabbed her pad and paper.

  He kept on separating sounds, inspecting them and listening to them, one earbud in. He didn’t like to cut off his hearing entirely. In truth, he was starting to feel a bit desperate. Things were taking too long. Eventually, he became aware of her humming, like a soft splash of heaven right onto his hell.

  Working on a song, he realized. Her dusky, breathy voice was evident even in whisper singing.

  She looked up, as if she’d felt his gaze. “I’m sorry, am I distracting you?”

  He didn’t know how to answer that. She was, yet he needed her to keep going. Her stockings were distracting him, too, but he wouldn’t have her take them off for the world.

  “Devilwell?” she whispered. “I was just working out a tune, but…”

  “It’s no distraction.”

  She hummed on, but more softly now. He picked up his pace. Being near her buoyed him.

  But why wasn’t Rolly’s TZ password falling? He tried something new and the phone froze. He was running too much at once. He needed something more than a phone.

  “What is it?”

  “Does Rolly watch anything but pro sports? Does he have a favorite city or community team?”

  “No. Maybe a titch of college football. Texas A&M.”

  “Does he play on a team?”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “He uses a password system for his accounts. Lakers437, Dolphins437, Jazz437.”

  “We had a garage door password like that. Packers437. I forgot. Wow.”

  “Rolly wouldn’t abandon his system. He’s been systematic with everything.”