“What if Cromwell gets to him?”
“You mean, what if he tries to bribe him? Unless he’s been going boar-hunting with Stavros since they were teenagers, he won’t even get a hearing. As for assassination, there have been contracts on Stavros since he got involved in politics. It was exciting, at the time, in hotels, knowing there was someone trying to find him …
“He has a gift for you,” Fabienne says, and in response to Irina’s questioning look she says, “I told him you were a friend of my brother’s, and my father’s guest. My father, just yesterday … He didn’t tell me everything, but I know you fought for us, and suffered for it. So please accept this.” She takes something from her purse, puts it in Irina’s hand. It’s a Greek diplomatic passport; she opens it and there’s her own picture next to the name Elena Vougiouka. She flips through it, sees the colorful stamps of many countries, the record of this fictive self’s trajectory through the world. “Your U.S. passport is flagged, it turns out, so you’ll want to travel with this.”
“A fake passport seems to invite more problems.”
“Eh,” shrugs Fabienne. “What’s fake? It’s a real diplomatic passport. As far as my old boyfriend is concerned, and thus the Greek state, you’re Elena Vougiouka.” She glances at her phone. “Now you must excuse me. My nine-year-old son is declaring that he is now a man, and that it’s his right and duty to raise an army and avenge his grandfather, and so far he’s managed not to cry.”
“I’ll take care of that. Tell him I said so.”
Fabienne’s hand on her shoulder, and, to her surprise, her tension lessens. She remembers when she was thirteen and hiding in the woods near the villa on Patmos, but of course she first set foot on Patmos a few days ago, and this is Constantin’s memory—he’d been the one Fabienne had found among the shadows of the oaks, though he couldn’t have been more than nine—her young face ancient in the dappled light—her presence enough to calm him. “Goodbye, my dear. Good luck to you,” Fabienne says, and then she’s off into the concourse.
Irina remembers being thirteen, sitting in the foyer of her parents’—by then, she supposes, her—attorney’s office, four months to the day out of surgery, still groggy on her ration of painkillers, nauseated from antibiotics. The windows framed grey skies where clouds of birds passed and disappeared, though not in her other memory, where their flight was perfectly preserved, at which she had still, then, marveled. It had seemed like she was being useful, holding on to what would otherwise be lost, but her lawyer, whom she liked, was talking, so she’d let the exact enumeration of blurred flocks fade and wrenched herself back into the present.
The bartender, who’s been at a discreet distance, catches her eye, raises an eyebrow, but she shakes her head, stands, puts money on the bar. Time to act.
* * *
Maya picks up on the first ring, though for her it’s the middle of the night. “I’ve got bad news, sweetie,” Maya opens, sounding like she’s in tears. “They’re shutting down the agency.”
“What? Who? I thought you were making all kinds of money.”
“We were, and I was, and now they’re shutting it down. No explanation, and no remorse, as far as I can tell, and I lose all my equity unless I sign a noncompete and don’t talk to any former clients for five years. The managing directors, of whom I was very soon to be one, say they’re sorry and blah blah boilerplate, but the gist is that they’re not allowed to talk about it. Not allowed? My assistant said their assistants said they got bought out, and the buyout had terms. It makes no sense, but fuck them all in their tiny, wizened little hearts. So I’m packing up my office, by which I mean I’m drinking heavily in what used to be my office, while calling my clients to let them know they need to find new representation, and then I’ll leave all this shit for someone else to clean up and go get wasted at the Ermitage bar, where I intend to go home with the hottest, dumbest guy I can find.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, take up fuckin’ needlepoint? Isn’t that what sixty-four-year-olds are supposed to do?” Maya looks thirty-five, and is, hormonally, about eighteen, with a supplemental testosterone boost, an option that she, Irina, has always chosen to forgo. “It doesn’t really matter—I don’t have to work for the next fifteen years or so, and by then whatever the fuck this is will be over, and the world will have changed.”
“I think I know what this is,” says Irina. “He doesn’t want me to have allies.”
“Fucking who doesn’t want you to have allies?” Faint glugging sound on Maya’s end, as of liquid pouring out of a bottle.
“Is this phone secure?”
“Hell yeah. It’s mine, not the company’s, anonymously registered and encrypted all to fuck. You think I ever really trusted them? I know what business I’m in. Was in. Fuckers,” she says, choking back a sob.
Irina tells her what happened, and is, for once, reasonably forthcoming.
“Wow. Fuck that guy. Seriously, he needs to get his ass liquidated. If TMP still existed I’d say call Parthenon and put it on our tab.”
“As it happens, they’re my next call.”
* * *
The empty chapel is as hushed as a library. It strikes her as theatrical, coming here to order a hit.
She dials Parthenon’s number from memory on the phone she just bought. A brief parlay with a secretary, and then her soldier picks up, saying, “Miss Sunden.”
“I need a definitive solution,” says Irina. “To that difficult problem we discussed.”
“Timeline?”
“As soon as possible.”
“I’ll have a look and get back to you as soon as I can,” he says, his composure so thorough as to be almost offensive. “Any special instructions?”
“Please do this soon. He just tried to have me kidnaped. I still bear the wounds.”
“In that case, I’d best get started.”
* * *
Leaving the chapel, she sees there are more soldiers in the airport now, thanks, she supposes, to Fabienne’s ex. Strange to be the fulcrum of international events, and the source of the headaches and perplexity now being suffered by whatever Turkish officials.
Tempting to linger in this in-between place, but it occurs to her that Cromwell’s rented killers could be taking commercial flights back to the States; she imagines some hard-eyed boy with a crew cut and muscles sitting down beside her and checking her out—the flash of recognition—suddenly remote, he takes out his phone …
The ticketing concourse is huge, chaotic, full of tourists. She chooses Prosperity Airways because the line is shortest. Waiting, she stares vacantly up at their logo, a schematic map of East Asia with Japan and its possessions picked out in red and gold. The board over the ticket counter shows impending departures, which creates a strange sense of pressure, as though she’s late for all of them, but her mind is cloudy and she’s almost at the front of the line when she realizes she’s been drifting, has yet to choose a destination.
It should be someplace where the powers-that-be are likely to take violent umbrage at even a well-connected U.S. plutocrat coming in and playing warlord, but to assess this would require an understanding of the fluid alliances and quiet understandings that define the shape of power in the world, which hasn’t, until now, concerned her.
Front of the line now.
Just have to choose.
47
Something to Cry About
Kern wakes as the first light touches the jungle. The ground is steaming, his sleeping bag damp. The motion of the leaves makes patterns on the sky, shadows of birds darting through the bright empty spaces. Lots of birds, here, and though he rarely sees them clearly he’s come to know their songs. Good to think of them living their lives up there, indifferent to the surface of the world.
Kuan Lon already feels like just the next thing, not much different from any other place. It’s almost disappointing. He wants there to be another city, or sequence of cities, cursed cities buried ever dee
per in the jungle, dead and shattered, stained skulls entangled in suffocating vines, culminating in some unfathomable absolute zero.
Six fights in two days, all won by knockout, and he’s as sore as he’s ever been. His hands are an agony, stiffened almost into claws. He has money, now—Singdam, who also goes by Simon, the Thai promoter with the Australian voice, keeps doubling his purses, just like Final Sword. When he fights all the farang cheer for him, throwing yellow flowers and candy into the ring, afterwards stuffing bills into his hands.
He lies there, craving more sleep, knowing it’s unattainable, hoping it will help a little just being still. His fights haven’t gone long but even a few minutes in the ring are exhausting, and he feels like he’s approaching an edge, that something will be revealed if he can just maintain focus and keep pushing through his fatigue. Dead hours before him until the lights in the trees wink on at sunset and then his seventh fight.
Crash of someone coming through the wood, water drops flying from lashing branches. Probably another bar girl. There was one who’d come to his clearing in the middle of the day and, catching his eye, matter-of-factly dropped her shorts, lest he miss the point, and turned her head and smiled, and this and the sun on her thighs and her wisps of pubic hair were the stuff of fantasy but the fights had hollowed him out and he was unmoved by the sight of her, and he’d thought this must be how naked people look to animals, and in a voice more distant and cordial than he’d known he possessed he’d told her to go home.
Sulfur on the air as a match is struck and then burning tobacco, and a man says, “Boy, do you have any idea how much heaven and earth have been moved to find you?” Hiro steps into the clearing wearing a suit and swiping beaded water from the jacket, holding his little silver gun.
“Oh,” Kern says. He’s wrapped up like a package in his sleeping bag—no point in even trying to get away. Screeching overhead as a mass of birds rises from the branches and in the rushing of their wings he thinks yes, it might as well be here, and it might as well be now, but Hiro just watches the birds scatter into the air and the moment passes. It hits Kern that there will be no seventh fight. He closes his eyes.
* * *
They’re walking on a game trail as light slowly fills the jungle, and though his hands are cuffed behind his back and Hiro is five paces behind with the ghost’s phone in his pocket he feels at peace and is achingly aware of every rustle and creak in the shifting leaves and branches. He knows there are animals in the jungle, quiet and watchful, though he’s never seen one, and if they’re ever to be revealed it will be now, and even if they’re not then at least they’ll be the ones to find his body, approaching over the fallen leaves with a diffidence learned over ten thousand generations, and long after his corpse has corrupted and his bones have turned to dust they’ll still be here, living the same lives, and he feels lucky that here at the end he’s depleted enough to be both neutral and accepting.
“Zero point eight percent,” says Hiro. “That’s how much of the world’s total computational power we leased to try to find you. Server farms everywhere from Barrow to Klamath Falls have been doing nothing these last weeks but sifting images for you. What images, you ask? All of the images. All the images that were going up on the web plus footage from our spy drones flying over the major cities plus all the footage from certain makes of security cameras with whose manufacturers we’ve made arrangements. You wouldn’t believe the cost, but if I ever had that much money I wouldn’t be consorting with the likes of you and me. And all this to find a two-bit street fighter on the lam. I certainly hope you’re sensible of the honor.”
Kern says nothing. Plans rise unbidden in his mind—he could pretend to trip and if Hiro is incautious enough to get close then heel-kick him in the groin, and as this is one of his strongest street techniques there’s a fair chance that if the kick lands he’ll rupture one of Hiro’s testicles, in which case Hiro, no matter how fearless or strong of mind, will double over, and for at least a few seconds be out of the fight, and then if Kern is prepared to tear his left shoulder from its socket he can use his right hand to try for the gun—and part of him thinks he should go for it, that it’s better by far to die fighting than passively, but he knows that plans like that only really work in movies and to try it would accomplish nothing, or maybe get him killed slightly sooner, and so he’d lose these last minutes of the morning.
“Your fans were your downfall,” says Hiro. “Goes to show you. Yet another celebrity destroyed by fame. Kuan Lon is all Halliburton cowboys, wholesale traffickers and hungry desperadoes, and let’s not forget the occasional child-sex tourist, but they still feel the need to share their travels with their friends. We found you in photos of your third fight on a Romanian social network.
“I got here yesterday. Not strictly protocol, but I got interested. Hell, I’d even say I’m a fan. You know, at first we thought you had tradecraft, and then we thought you were some refugee from the fighting circuits taking piecework as an enforcer, but then we found your room, and your laptop, and it turns out you’re straight-up refugee.”
They come to a clearing where the air shimmers and the sunlight seems somehow to have thickened, and as he gets closer he realizes that there’s something there, a transparent, blocky geometry floating before him in the air, deadening the wind, and there’s a faint reek of ozone, oil, hot metal, rubber.
Hiro says, “Library, deploy ambient atmospheric from four a.m. three nights ago over the South China Sea,” and for an instant light swarms in the empty space before him and then that light becomes thunderheads roiling and flashing, illuminated from within by lightning’s pulse and snarl, as though Hiro’s words opened a magic door onto a distant storm, and he thinks of the books the laptop gave him long ago about children going through wardrobes into perilous lands.
Hiro says, “Decloak,” and the storm vanishes, becoming a black jet, sleek and sharklike, its aspect entirely predatory compared to the cetacean bulk of the passenger liners he took to Bangkok and Taiwan. Its wings are pulled close to its body, giving it the look of a resting pterodactyl. Vertical takeoff and landing, he thinks. VTOL. Close up, the plane’s skin is covered in tiny hexagons, each the size of his thumbnail; now the hexagons are swimming with colors that resolve into leaves and branches in motion, as though the jet can’t stand to be just itself.
“I knew you’d like that,” Hiro says.
* * *
The cabin’s deeply padded seats are upholstered in creamy leather with complicated multistage seat belts that must be precautions against intense aerobatics and the leather has a smell that he can’t quite name. The cabin’s cramped interior is all black webbing, matte aluminum and mil-spec austerity. Hiro cuffs his wrist to the armrest and he feels he should stay alert but as the plane’s ascent pushes him down into the seat his eyes start to close and it’s only then that he realizes that he knows the smell, that it’s the same as the interior of Akemi’s car, that the smell is money.
* * *
Faint vibration, muffled drone of engines. Night outside, moonglow shining through the tiny windows, no other light in the cabin but the faint glow from the jet’s display. The metal cuff rests lightly on his wrist—he almost doesn’t feel it if he doesn’t move his hand. Shameful not to at least try to escape, but the cabin is a dreamscape, and the bulkheads waver and fall away.
It’s still night when he wakes again. Hiro is across from him, sprawled in his seat in the dark. Kern’s certain that he’s sleeping until Hiro says, “One time I tried to leave, you know.” A pause, and then, “You see, I’d stopped drinking.”
Another pause, the plane shivering as it passes through turbulence, leaves it behind.
“How does one kill? It’s easy, with an enemy, in the passion of the moment, but to kill strangers, day after day? It erodes the soul.
“I was rarely sober. None of us were, not since we graduated from the police academy and started working. The bosses were particular about that. Every day it was a new hotel,
and in every new hotel room there were bottles of vodka and bags of cocaine and a stack of guns like a welcoming bouquet. The vodka was for numbness, and the cocaine for the focus and false confidence to carry us through the valley of death, day after day, world without end.
“Time works differently in that life. There’s a fluidity, a sense of events coming on like waves, and they might break and wash harmlessly around your ankles or they might carry you away. Cause and effect blur—if the man was shot then it was his time to die. If the woman was behind the wall that did not stop the bullet then she must somehow have offended the bosses. I never slept in the same bed twice, or used the same woman twice, or drove the same car for more than a week.
“And then there were these signs, billboards, all over the city. They said, ‘Call on Him, for He is Waiting.’ It was just some church looking for converts, and a picture of Jesus they got off the web, but it seemed like they were speaking to me. There was this one, on the outskirts, out toward the army shooting range. I’d chain-smoke in my car and stare at it, like I was trying to pierce its mystery.
“I stopped drinking and using. I even quit coffee. Clean, I felt the fear, radiant and brittle, all around me, all the time. We lived at the boss’s pleasure and could die at any time and there was no way out of that life, but I was sick with the letting of blood. I didn’t know what to do, so I fucked a lot of women and watched a lot of movies and then I cracked and started drinking again. I decided I’d run for it. First I skimmed money. I was clever about it, but they knew.
“I was commanding my own unit then, and it was my own men who collected me. I’d taken a lot of pills that morning, mostly dilaudid, but I knew what was happening as soon as I saw the black armored SUV pull up to the curb, like it was the nightmare I’d been waiting for all my life.
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