by Michael Crow
“Fuckin’ A,” I say now. “I could get to really dig this kind of life.”
“Don’t get too comfortable, too settled, Luther.” He’s the only one who’s never bothered with that Terry bullshit. “You satisfied with the security arrangements? You comfortable with your new Korean teammate?”
“Everything’s tight. This place is tight. We’re tight. Though I won’t know that absolutely until there’s some action. And I can’t even speculate because nobody’s telling me shit about that.”
“Nothing’s coming, here,” Westley says. He sounds genuinely convinced of this, his tone has a superior surety I don’t trust. It feels too absolute. Or artfully deceptive. Experience says scratch overconfidence. “You may take this whole ride without even drawing once. Then you’ll owe me for an all-expenses-paid luxury tour of the Far East.”
“Such exotic destinations, too,” I say. “Why think of Phuket or Kota Kinabalu when you can have Pyongyang and the stunning beauty of Vladivostok, Russia’s sub-arctic Riviera?”
Westley makes small barks—his version of mild laughter. Now he’s going to give me some need-to-know, I’m thinking, when the barks stop suddenly as they started.
“I know you’re restless, bored. But we’ll be moving soon,” he says. “You’re off tonight. Why don’t you go out to dinner with Nadya and Allison?”
“Their idea? Or yours?” So where’s the information, I’m thinking.
“Luther, you think I’m getting slow, losing my touch?” Short, sharp barks again. “Nadya’s been radiating since that night at BWI. Give the girl a break, won’t you? I want her content, relaxed, happy. Keep her so. Not exactly rough duty, I imagine. If she didn’t regard me as a fossilized fart, I’d gladly fill in for you.”
“No idea what you’re talking about. We’re all business, total professionals.”
“Our teams are always professional.” He’s mocking himself a little. That’s a new one. “Anyway, she’s made reservations. And tonight’s the night. Tomorrow night Mister Kim is throwing a party for his local friends. He always does this when he’s about to head back home, some sense of social obligation, I suppose. You and your big Korean colleague will be on duty. But out of sight. Invisible. You know the drill.”
“Right. No problem.”
“Good. Stay sharp tomorrow. Be any way you want tonight,” Westley says. He turns, walks quickly away.
Damn! He gave up nothing. Just neatly deflected me by revealing he’s conscious of that airport night with Nadya. The man’s uncanny. He knew about Mikla too, though we kept it as secret as we could—her parents were fairly strict Muslims—appearing together only when we were working. So now he throws up a little screen to take my mind off the fact that he decided Allison was wrong, that I have sufficient information for the task at hand. Pure Westley, devious bastard.
Suddenly I’m juked.
Allison did not tell Westley about Sonny. He’d have made at least an oblique pass on the matter, if he knew what I’d said. He’d want more. He’d need more. It was his nature, it was hardwired into him, he had the skills to get it from me. But he never even tried.
Allison did not tell him. I’m certain of this, down to the bone.
And I’m certain something’s off. Something major. An operational protocol’s been broken. Allison would never have held something like that back without powerful reasons.
But I don’t have any idea—not even enough data to speculate—what those reasons could be.
It’s Nadya who picks me up at Kim’s front gate around nineteen hundred hours. Just Nadya, who’s taken some trouble over her hair and dress, smiling like a Siamese cat who’s pleased as hell with herself.
“Where’s our chaperone? Where’s Comrade Allison?” I ask as I slide into the car.
“Our commissar?” Nadya laughs. Those canted blue eyes seem luminous in the dimming light. “Purged! She slandered a trusted apparatchik.”
“Yeah? Who would that be?”
“Why, me, actually. She called me a Trotskyite tart. It was my duty to denounce her to the Chekists. As any good Bolsheviki would.”
“Okay, Russki. That’s the Pravda version. What’s the truth?”
“Terry, darling! I’d thought you’d be rather pleased to have me to yourself. Your concern is beginning to make me rather jealous.”
“As a highly trained operative, I can’t wait to see you naked again. But deviation from norms concerns me.”
“Dialectics! And from a proletarian! Shocking, I must say.” Nadya huffs, then giggles. “Our oh-so-ambitious Allison, if you must know, begged off. She claimed she absoutely must work tonight.”
“And you believe that?”
“Well, of course! Allison would never allow a Russki slut like me to go out alone with you unless she had matters of highest urgency concerning national security to attend to. Quite dedicated, she is. As you know.”
I lean over, find her lips, give her the deepest kiss. “And I was so sad thinking there’d only be that one night.”
“Aren’t we the lucky couple, then?”
“For sure. Where are we going to eat?”
“Intimate little place. Nothing much in the way of food, but the atmosphere’s quite special.” She grins. “My cabin? Will that suit?”
It does, perfectly. Nadya’s a gift, her lithe little ballerina’s body a treasure. I’m really into her way of keeping her eyes wide open and fixed on mine. It feels like a kind of superintimacy.
“Confess. Confess, you,” she murmurs.
“Anything,” I say.
“Then admit I’m the best. The best ever.”
“Yes. It’s true.”
“And say this is better than any fantasy you’re ever had about that Annie woman or any other girl in the wide, wide world.”
“You’ve erased all fantasies. Gone. Never had them. You are my whole world.”
“Hah! I do not believe this. You’re a revisionist dog. You need correction. I’m going to give you more correction. I am going to be very strict with you.”
And she is. I’m loving it, even if a nasty, naggy little suspicion that Nadya might only be on the job won’t vanish like every other thought or sense except the pure physical sensations she’s creating.
But even that bad thought’s reduced to the barest outline by her corrective methods. When she drives me back to Kim’s just past midnight—my Cinderella hour—I’m a wasted man. Who has the poor luck to bump into Sonny in the corridor just moments before I can reach my room and collapse onto my bed.
He looks me up and down, shakes his head in mock digust. “You some kind of disgrace, Mistah Prentice. No trusting you at all. Turn my back one minute, you sneaking off to bounce around that Allison girl. What you got to say for yourself?”
“I’m about incapable of speech right now.”
Sonny almost howls. “Skinny piece like her beat you up too much? Me, I’m disgusted. She really jump your bones, huh? You bettah get lots of sleep tonight. ’Cause you and me, we got a late night tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah,” I manage. “The party. No problem.”
“Never been a problem before,” Sonny says. “But never had that Mistah Westley around before. Eyes sharp tomorrow, you hearing that? No more bouncy-bouncy for you, I think.”
seventeen
THE HITTERS COME JUST PAST MIDNIGHT. FUCKERS think they’re ninjas or something. But they’re amateurs, watched too many movies.
Sonny and I have finished a circuit, half-finished coffees in the monitor room, when the watcher hisses through his teeth. Our eyes go to the screens. The steady green lines of the infrared perimeter are strobing in two separate places. Then the motion sensors in those areas buzz. Intruders over the fence. I don’t hesitate; I ease back the slide of the HK SOG .45 with the long, tubular supressor screwed to its muzzle, confirm there’s a round in the chamber. Then slip the night-vision goggles I’ve felt like a fool carrying around all evening over my head. Shadows flick on the video monitors. I turn towa
rd Sonny, laugh. We look like a couple of giant insects in business suits.
“Crazy guys, Mistah Prentice,” he says. “We go commit some mayhem, okay?”
We slip out the rear door of our wing like we’re greased. No moon, no mist. Lights from the main house dancing on the surface of the pool seem bright as lightning flashes through the goggles, but wisely Sonny’s had no floods illuminating the grounds. We pause where two tightly clipped hedges of cypress form a straight path to that nice redwood deck on the edge of the sea cliff. Only sound’s the breakers bashing the cliff base. Sonny listens a second to what’s coming over his earphone from the watcher in the monitor room, holds up three thick fingers, points right, then holds up two, points left. Before he’s even finished the gesture I’m moving right, hugging the outside of the hedge, then moving crouched but fast over the needled ground from one low, twisted pine to another. Scan the terrain, everything that weird wavery pale green night-eyes make the world, every object and feature clear but somehow not quite real.
Gets real, real fast. An idiot all in black with a black hood, carrying a suppressed MP5, emerges from behind a tree fifteen meters off. My HK pop-pops softly as I double-tap. A can’t-miss situation, no challenge at all. Asshole never even sees who sent 200-grain XTPs slamming into his belly, his upper chest. Just goes down, doesn’t even twitch.
I cut an arc around behind the body, moving from tree to tree, cliff at my back. See my other two targets moving together toward the house, zigging and zagging on the far side of the pool. I’m behind them now, maybe twenty-five meters. Looks like one’s got an M4 with a grenade launcher under the barrel, the other’s carrying a Steyr AUG assault rifle. They pause behind the last stunted pine before a stretch of open grass. From there they’ve got a clear, short shot at the glass wall of the main house. Bad mistake, that pause; they should have zigged apart. I’m zeroed on them, kneeling, with the HK held in both hands. The M4 ninja slides sideways a foot, ready to send a grenade arcing through glass into the main room. I cap him, aiming for a head shot but hitting him in the back of his neck, just where it meets his shoulders. He sprawls foward, flat on his face. The Steyr guy fucks up worse. He freezes, head swiveling wildly, no doubt wondering where the hell that pop came from. I double-tap him in the back. Down. Then I sprint up, put one in each of their heads, just in case they’re wearing body armor.
I think I hear a couple of pops on the other side of the house. Must be Sonny committing mayhem. I move fast toward the first hitter, head-shoot him once. Just in case. Fuck cover then. I run back to the hedge, go left. See Sonny strolling back, pistol pointed to the ground. I lower mine.
“You take them down okay, no problem, Mistah Prentice?” he calls.
“Three. No problem at all.”
“Ah, that good, Mistah Prentice.” Sonny removes his goggles. “Yeah, watcher telling me they down, no movement. Good mayhem. But now I gotta inform Mistah Kim, goddamn. You like to walk around the house once, twice? Double-check?”
“Roger that.” Sonny’s hitters are sprawled awkward in death, one on either side of the gravel walk about ten meters from the front door. I keep circling, take off my goggles when I reach the swimming pool. I can see perfectly into the main room. There’s the party in full swing, a few couples dancing, Nadya about to give some white-haired coot in a blue blazer cardiac arrest, Allison pretending she’s not bored shitless by a white-haired woman with a black cardigan draped over the shoulders of her garishly flowered dress. A couple nice pieces of imported eye candy walk around hip-shot, like runway models. Giving Rob and a few strangers who look like him neck strain as they try to watch and keep their conversation going at the same time. Kim’s off to one side, into it with Westley and two CEO-types closer to Westley’s age than his. Kim’s grinning big time. Trace of music, mostly bass notes, leaks through the double-paned glass.
Nobody in there ever heard a thing. Nobody there had any idea the party was seconds away from getting juiced and jolted by a 40mm grenade, followed by a lot of full-auto spray.
Anybody in there still alive after the grenade would have heard that pretty clear.
I see Sonny sidle up to Kim, suit unmussed and weapon either left in the monitor room or perfectly concealed. He mouths a couple of words. Kim bobs at the two CEOs, takes Westley by the arm, and they follow Sonny out of the room. Nobody seems to notice. Except Allison, whose eyes track them. A Rob-type, likely some software start-up’s starter Kim has invested in, is dancing so close with one of the imported sweeties that their bodies look like they’ve been glued together. They’re moving toward the wall. I see the girl’s ass pressed against the glass, see her partner’s hands creep round, start pulling up her skirt. She isn’t wearing anything under.
That’s enough. I cross the pool terrace, enter the back door, go straight to the monitor room. Sonny, Kim, Westley, and the watcher are all scanning the bank of monitors. Most just show landscapes. Three show still lifes, with corpses.
Kim’s face is tight, skin gone sallow. “Terrible, terrible. How can this be?” he’s saying, flicking a hand at the screens as if the gesture will make the images vanish. “How can this be, Westley?”
“As we discussed, Mister Kim,” Westley says. “The very reason we agreed to take certain measures.”
Kim’s right leg starts to tremble. “People murdered outside my house. No, no, no. This can’t be. We did not discuss killing. We did not.”
“I must remind you we spoke at length of threats from ultra-rightist Korean groups bitterly opposed to your connection with the North,” Westley says. “Someone—perhaps one of those groups—sent these men to kill you tonight, Mister Kim. They had to be eliminated. I assumed you understood the possibility of such an event. Why else would you have accepted my suggestion that we increase your security arrangements?”
“You assume too much! I never wanted anything like this. It’s horrible!”
Kim’s voice rises half an octave, both hands flapping now. Suddenly he notices my presence. He makes a visible effort to calm himself, shoving those hands into his jacket pockets. Face. He doesn’t want to lose face. He may also be realizing at last that he was very close to being assassinated a few minutes ago. But his eyes recoil from the HK he spots in my hand.
“Mister Prentice,” Kim says. “Mister Prentice, I…yes, thank you for dealing with this so efficiently.”
“I realize this is very unpleasant, Mister Kim,” Westley says. “Extremely upsetting for everyone. But I believe it would be instructive if we reviewed the incident. To put it into proper perspective, so to speak. May we?”
Kim looks at Sonny, glances at me, stares at Westley. Then his gaze seems to drift down to his leg. It’s still trembling. But he nods to the watcher at the console, who rewinds and plays the tapes on two monitors. I see some alien insectoid in a suit with an HK, see some muzzle flashes, see the alien cut an arc. More muzzle flashes as he shoots two ninjas from behind. First time I’ve ever seen myself kill after the fact. I’m juked, a little dizzy.
“Those men were heavily armed, Mister Kim. Their intentions were evil. Mister Park and Mister Prentice did only what was necessary to prevent a tragedy,” Westley says. Kim’s face is tighter, his color worse.
“Yes. Of course,” Kim says.
“I’d appreciate it if those tapes were erased. Right now, please,” I say.
I’m ignored.
“Be assured, Mister Kim, there will be no trace of tonight’s unfortunate incident,” Westley says. “We will identify the bodies. And we will find whoever might have sent these people here.”
“The, eh, bodies will of course be removed quickly? Before my guests begin to depart?” Kim asks.
“Absolutely, sir,” Westley says. “No need to ruin anyone’s evening. No need anyone outside this room should ever know a thing about this.”
Fucking Westley. This kind of shit was not supposed to happen. Not here, for sure.
In the little staff lounge next to the monitor room, Sonny pops a be
er and I pour myself a coffee from the Thermos. I sit, light a cigarette. He stands, shifting his weight leg to leg, drains half the bottle in one pull. “You some pretty slick guy, Mistah Prentice.” He kills the bottle, tosses it into a plastic trashcan. “Long time since I commit any mayhem.”
“Looked to me like you’ve kept your edge,” I say.
Sonny laughs, pops a second beer; the sound’s only marginally less than an HK firing. He drains half the bottle, sets it down smartly on the table. The adrenaline dump does a fast fade. So does his smile.
“That Mistah Westley! All his fault, damn straight.”
“How’s that?” I ask.
“What I tell you before? Six, seven years, never troubles. None. Westley come around, I’m thinking here troubles coming up, for sure.”
“Not quite following you on this.”
“Listen, Mistah Prentice. Seen this lotsa times before. Before I work for Mistah Kim, I’m in ROK Army—special unit, all I can say. We train hard, nothing ever happen, though. Then three, four times American guys like Westley show up, hang around a little. Next thing, crisscross DMZ, shitload of fireworks or sneak around slitting throats, what’s the difference?”
Sonny retrieves his beer, sips. “First time, I think oh, special mission. Second, I think, what’s the damn word, coincidence? Third time I get it. CIA guys just draw trouble like shit draw flies. Fourth time, know I’m wrong. Shit just lies there, don’t do nothing, flies come automatic, understand? CIA guys, they don’t just lie there. They run around, make lotsa noise, invite the bad guys for party. Only they never stay to party. Leave us to do it. Fuckers!”
“You got a point,” I say.
“Hunh!” Sonny grunts. “You one of them, Mistah Prentice.”
“No, I’m not. Ex-Special Forces, never CIA. Just got a job offer from Westley, short-term, and took it. Needed the work.”
“Hunh!” Sonny interlocks his fingers, pushes out. His knuckles pop. “Maybe yeah, maybe no. You do pretty good work. I got no problem working with you. Got big problem that we got to do it. Why those men come over the fence? Why they want to get Mistah Kim?”