Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “And then?”

  “Then it gets complicated. I’ll tell you on the way.”

  He turns on the bedside lamp. The room is opulent, part of a princely life he’s now abandoning. “Take everything you need,” says Akemi. “You aren’t coming back.”

  * * *

  He strides down the hotel corridor with the bullpup swaddled in a bathrobe in the crook of his arm. The thick carpet stifles his footsteps—no sound but the metronomic thump of the duffel on his side. (He wadded the suit into the duffel, which can’t be good for it, but at least he’s got it with him.) He’d expected to hear some kind of human noise from behind the doors—whatever sex, snoring, chatter, TV—but there’s no sound at all.

  The door to Hiro’s room is the same as all the others. The corridor is empty in both directions; he stands there, listening, awaiting a sign. He slips his hand into the rolled-up bathrobe, finds the grip by touch, and clicks off the safety, absurdly afraid the noise will rouse the hotel.

  His hand hovers over the door handle. Akemi had said that she’d make sure it was open, but how, exactly, was she going to do that? He’s known hackers, even a few girl ones, and all as unlike Akemi as could be.

  He turns the handle with painstaking care and is suddenly certain, absolutely certain that Hiro is waiting for him inside, lolling in an armchair and dandling a gun; he’ll have forced Akemi to call him, and in fact she’ll be in a room just a few doors away, sloppy drunk, pillows pressed over her ears so she doesn’t have to listen to him die. Game to the end, he’ll fire the bullpup at Hiro’s chest but Hiro will cock an eyebrow as he savors Kern’s dawning realization that he’s shooting blanks.

  The door eases open onto darkness, silence.

  He shuts the door behind him and stands there in the suite’s living room, heart hammering, wishing he were back in the ring in Kuan Lon. As his eyes adjust he sees faint spectral television light shining under the bedroom door.

  The room is a mess. Bottles glint here and there, and there are crumpled clothes on the floor, among them a girl’s lacy underwear. On the coffee table is a bullet standing on end next to a pile of crumbling white powder.

  He almost steps on a sticky room service plate, freezes in mid-motion, carefully places his foot on the carpet. He sees the winking green lights of a laptop on the desk, and there, connected to it by a data cable, is the phone. Keeping one hand for the bullpup, he detaches the cable, then puts the phone in his pocket, as easy as that.

  A noise behind him and he whirls with the gun at his shoulder, the bathrobe starting to slide, then slumping to the floor. In the doorway to the bedroom is a naked girl, very pretty, staring at him wide-eyed, frozen in the act of reaching down to get her underwear. Her eyes track him as he moves to get a better look behind her, but he just sees a darkness, the glow of TV. She makes a rueful face and shrugs her shoulders infinitesimally to convey that she’s just doing a gig, and has no vested interests here, that as far as she’s concerned he’s quite welcome to kidnap or kill her client, and could she please go home.

  He mimes closing the door, which she does with exaggerated care, and then she steps into the living room with her palms raised. Only a little light filters out from under the bedroom door but it’s enough for him to be distracted by her beauty—Hiro must have spared no expense—and she looks like a marble statue, standing there without expression.

  There’s no good option. He’s not going to kill her, and he doesn’t want to choke her out, and even if he did he doesn’t think he could do it silently, so he guesses he has to let her go. He decides to give her money, both to buy her continued silence and goodwill and because Kayla, his ex, who seems far in the past now, had been militant about kindness to sex workers. As he reaches into his front pocket for his money the bullpup dips to the side, which she appears to read as an indication that she should leave, and her face doesn’t change as she sidles toward the door, staring at him fixedly, and he wants to say wait, take some money, take your clothes, at least take the bathrobe, but of course he can’t say a thing, and then she’s gone.

  He realizes he’s done there, unless he wants to tiptoe into the bedroom and shoot Hiro in the face, an idea of considerable strategic merit, but if just one person hears the gunshot and calls the cops or even the lobby then his life is done, and Hiro could have killed him in Kuan Lon, in fact had meant to but instead let him live, gave him gifts and the place he’s now discarding.

  Out in the hall he closes the door carefully, wonders if Akemi is watching from somewhere and will lock it behind him, but he doesn’t hear a click. He looks to his left and there’s the girl speed-walking away, and just at that moment she looks back over her shoulder, sees him, hesitates. On her back is a tattoo of a phoenix, its wings unfurled over her shoulder blades, its long tail reaching her coccyx, and in the corridor’s low light its feathers flash green and blue, as iridescent as the throat of a hummingbird, an effect he’s never seen in a tattoo and of a quite hypnotic loveliness. Her eyes are on the bullpup, which he’s holding at port arms, so he clicks on the safety and lowers it, which is her signal to sprint off down the corridor like a startled deer. He tears his eyes from her lean grace and stuffs the gun into his duffel as he strides off the other way.

  * * *

  As the elevator falls past the ninetieth floor he realizes he didn’t close the duffel fully and the bullpup’s stock is protruding. He shoves it back into the bag, zips it shut and looks up at the car’s tiny security camera. A capital offense to be in possession, Hiro had said. He wonders if anyone is watching—probably not, in one elevator among many in the middle of the night, but what if they have automatic image recognition for guns? Does that even exist? Lares had said something about image recognition being a hard problem, but was that just for faces and people? It occurs to him that outside of fighting he doesn’t really know how anything works and has to guess his way through the world.

  The girl’s tattoo shimmers in his memory. The phoenix must be a potent symbol in her personal iconography, and he wonders what fires she’s passed through, what rebirth. Lares once said that soldiering and hooking were essentially the same job—dangerous, but more money than you could probably get otherwise, and they’d generally take you, if you were young and healthy, and both put you a little beyond the law.

  As the elevator falls past the fiftieth floor he takes out the phone, sees that it still has the earpiece attached. If she’s not on the phone he has no way of finding her, and no option but to leave Hong Kong and disappear as best he can, but when he puts the earpiece in she cheerily says, “So I guess it worked out, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he says, happy to hear her voice, and that once again they share a perspective. “I’ve got the phone. I’m in an elevator, going down. I don’t think Hiro woke up.”

  “Well done.”

  “I thought maybe you’d have been watching. I mean, you did find my room.”

  “It was dark in there, and then my net access went out,” she says, which seems strange, because aren’t phone access and net access basically the same thing? “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s fine. Now let’s get you the hell out of dodge.”

  * * *

  She guides him through a succession of freight elevators and service corridors where maids and housekeepers and waiters bustle past, seeming not to see him, as though he bears some mark that tells them he belongs.

  Down in the basements she guides him to a room that looks like it used to be a meat locker, but now a Filipino vendor has set up a kind of general store, his goods neatly stacked on blankets on the floor. “Get the highest-bandwidth satellite phone he has,” she says in his ear. “And lots of data cables. Like, thousands of feet. Also water, nuts, candy, whatever has the most calories per pound.”

  * * *

  Ditching the bullpup in a dumpster full of cardboard and sodden vegetables, he feels spiritually lighter.

  “Where are we going?” he asks as they walk through rooms full of boxes labeled in Ch
inese and middle-aged ladies squatting on the floor playing mahjong.

  “There’s a village up the coast,” she says. “Fishermen and smugglers, mostly, and apparently a bar scene. The government turns a blind eye, so it’s a surveillance blank spot. We can buy a boat there and no one will ask questions.”

  “I don’t know how to sail.”

  “It’ll be easy. You just have to motor out and meet these ships at sea.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Something like that. They’re unmanned drones, so you just have to motor up, climb on and hitch a ride. There’s an island on the equator and they’ll take you all the way there.”

  “Is that where you are?”

  “It will be by the time you get there.”

  “Am I rescuing you or what?”

  “There’s something I need you to do on the island. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll show you when we get there.”

  The corridor ends in double doors that open onto estuarine mud and salt water leaden under the low fog in the predawn light. He walks out into the black, sucking mud, feeling free, grateful to be out of doors even though his shoes are immediately ruined. A heron rises heavily into the air, croaking loudly. No sound but gulls, the low rush of waves. He looks back at the mass of rust-stained concrete—strange that Hong Kong, which had seemed inescapable, ends so abruptly. He looks up toward the city’s towers but they’re invisible in the fog.

  54

  Unwieldy, Lovely, Perhaps Eighteenth Century

  Night flight to Delhi.

  She half-wakes, feeling observed.

  The first class cabin is almost dark. The woman next to her, deep in her unrejuvenated fifties, is staring at the swelling on her jaw.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman says, but doesn’t look away. Her yellow skirt-suit is very good, but her face is a map of old pain. Overcoming her diffidence, the woman proffers her cup of ice, saying, “Does he do it much?”

  From a dream of nothing Irina says, “Just once, so I stole both his breath and the light in his eyes. But there’s someone else, and much worse, who would take everything from me.”

  Silence but for the air-conditioning.

  “You have to hurt him,” says the woman. “Badly. Everyone has a weakness. My husband hasn’t seen our children in five years, and so help me God he never will.”

  Another silence.

  “Take this,” the woman says, almost tenderly, again offering the cup of ice. “It’ll help with the swelling. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll look better this way.”

  Irina accepts the cup, presses it to her jaw. The woman leans back, shuts her eyes.

  * * *

  There’s a hotel inside the Delhi airport.

  Her room is a windowless, minimalist no-place; with nothing to grate on her sensibility, it’s easier to think.

  She’s sitting on her bed when her new phone rings.

  “Bad news,” says her soldier. “He’s gone to ground in his new offices, and there’s practically a battalion in the parking lot. I’ve never seen a non-state principal with that much security, and I served five years in Pashtunistan.”

  Of course it’s like that—she’s already sent Parthenon most all of her savings, but it couldn’t be as easy as making a call and beggaring herself. “Could someone, say, sneak in?” she asks, trying to hide her despair.

  “No. Too many drones in the air. It would be difficult under the best of circumstances, given that the building stands alone in the middle of several acres of empty parking lot.”

  “What about a frontal assault?”

  “Prohibitively expensive. That kind of thing is only really practical for the great merchant princes. Moreover, a dust-up is one thing, but no matter how well connected you are you can’t just start a ground war in the U.S. proper, not in the coastal cities, and hope to have a future.”

  Just room tone on the line as she tries to see how to work from the givens of the moment to Cromwell’s violent end. She could try to hack a military weapons satellite, but that’s a counsel of despair—she’d almost certainly fail, and if she somehow succeeded she’d be the focus of the state’s unappeasable wrath and probably live out her life at an extraterritorial black site in a hermetically sealed box. If she could somehow lure him to Greece, Fabienne’s old lover might have him disappeared; she could send him a ticket for Athens, coach class, and a pass for the Acropolis.

  “Why are you laughing?” asks her soldier.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “Are his troops armored?”

  “Of course.”

  It’s a potential weak point, though by now they must know she’s coming.

  “What if I neutralized his soldiers and his drones?”

  “They are many.”

  “But if I did?”

  “Then I’m your man.”

  * * *

  She dreams she’s in an antiquarian bookshop in the Back Bay, an atlas pressed into her waiting hands as someone says, “This is what you need.” The atlas is unwieldy, lovely, perhaps eighteenth century—waft of old paper as she opens it at random to a gilded mappa mundi, sees the faded olive of the plains, the black type on the spines of mountains, the rivers’ dendritic blue threads. The abandoned central latitudes are colored in washes of red aquarelle, the sites of dead cities marked in mottled bone white, and tiny silver circles gleam in LA, Sydney, Tokyo, what’s left of Costa Rica, though she can’t quite tell what they mean, and there, a fifth one, smaller than the rest, high among the towers of the city of Hong Kong.

  The silver circles fill her eyes though their significance eludes her and it’s only as she realizes that this is just a dream, and the circles an empty form, that she remembers.

  There was a report on W&P’s servers, glimpsed in passing in the course of her assault, and it’s right there in her other memory but she’d somehow till now overlooked it. “I traced the phone’s traffic,” wrote Andy Simoni. “The exercise was cut short, but it’s communicating with servers in LA, Australia, Tokyo, and Central America. I duly monitored the traffic on these nodes—all were in contact with the offshore server that’s been sending us email. It seems reasonable to infer that these four nodes are the points of origin of the stranger’s communication.” There are the nodes’ network addresses and GPS coordinates. Cromwell annotated the report: “Good job. Now leave them alone. No monitoring, no interference, no anything that might offend them or even come to their notice. I’m saying the same to all my people. Hiro will take anyone who doesn’t listen. Please attend meticulously to my orders, as I’m entirely serious.”

  Now she’s falling down into deeper levels of sleep but somewhere she’s smiling because she knows she’ll retain this wonder, this insight, her opening.

  * * *

  She sits up in bed. Her phone is ringing. The bedside clock reads 5:37 but it doesn’t say a.m. or p.m. and she’s not sure if it uses military time.

  “Don’t be mad,” Philip says, when she fumbles the phone to her ear. “I made Maya give me this number. I had to browbeat her. She was drunk, and knew my loyalty.”

  “Philip,” she says blearily, glad to hear his voice, but already this chink in her security.

  “Cromwell’s office is an armed camp now,” he says. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I heard about that,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “A … an employee told me. A mercenary, actually. A killer, I think. I’m keeping strange company.”

  “Tell me about that. In fact, tell me the whole deal. Last time we spoke you were coming to my house, in fear of your life, but you never actually showed up. I know you’re private, I try to be discreet, I never ask you for anything, but come on.”

  “I wish you hadn’t called Maya,” she says.

  “I have to try to make new friends, as my old ones are so disengaged.”

  “Philip.”

  “You’re right. Sorry to interfere. When you’re killed I’ll just have my secretary send flowers to
your grave. Plastic ones. Few, and botanically incorrect.” The lightness of his irony is forced, which means she’s really wounded him, but even so it’s in her mind to just hang up—she has enough to deal with, and her silence was partly for his benefit, but that’s not really honest, and in fact she has kept him at a distance, and here he is, still trying. With a sense of moving a great weight she tries to make herself apologize but the best she can do is “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s act like I believe you so you can tell me what’s going on. Maya wouldn’t be specific but I got the sense it’s a bad scene.”

  “I’m in…” she says, and as she’s about to tell him she remembers the atlas, the nodes, Cromwell’s orders that they be left alone. It seems reasonable to infer that these four nodes are the points of origin of the stranger’s communication. A plan arises fully formed in her mind—she’ll go to a node, break in, send email to Cromwell as the stranger. She could tell him to move his troops, then send Parthenon in for the kill, but no, her true intentions would be too obvious—Cromwell has limited leverage but isn’t stupid. She needs some reasonable pretext for Cromwell to leave himself open, but what does he want so badly he’d grasp for it blindly?

  “But don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” Philip says, and she’s being rude, again, and she’s already unworthy of his loyalty. The words “Magda to my Cromwell” arise in her mind, a thought that shames her, but she remembers Magda’s illness, Cromwell’s despair, the university he’s founding in her honor, and then, like a gift, she has it—she’ll make Cromwell expose himself by offering him Magda’s life.

  “Actually, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “You do a lot of business abroad, right?”

  “Yes,” he sighs.

  “So of Tokyo, Sydney and LA, where would Cromwell have the least influence?” Central America is out of the question—wildcatting resource-extraction companies, nocturnal temperatures in the hundred twenties, the states tantamount to legal fictions.

  “Tokyo,” he says without hesitation. “In LA, shooters are plentiful and cheap and the police are disorganized. In Sydney they’re still trying but the writ of law only holds in certain neighborhoods and the map keeps changing. In Japan, though, xenophobia is your friend—there are no guns and certainly no mercs allowed on the islands, and they’d take a dim view of some gaijin warlord coming in and flexing his muscles.”