by Ian Hamilton
“Good. Now you wait here and I’ll be back with your phone.”
Ava walked back into the kitchen. The three men standing near the stove turned simultaneously. There was no hesitation in their manner, no doubt in their eyes. Uncle had a good man in Perkasa, and Perkasa had good men in Waru and Prayogo.
“We need to get the banker’s cellphone from his car,” she said.
Perkasa spoke to Prayogo and then said to Ava, “What did you arrange?”
“He’s going to call his housekeeper and tell her he’s sending someone from the golf course to pick up a gift for a friend. You’re going to be the someone.”
“Okay.”
“When you get there, tell her that Mr. Cameron might have to leave on a business trip to Singapore that evening, and he asked you to ask her to pack a suitcase for him with just enough things for an overnight stay. He will want his passport put into the case. Tell her that if he is going, he’ll go to the airport directly from dinner and he’ll call her and update her on his schedule.”
“Do you have the housekeeper’s name?”
“Yannie.”
“Good. And this gift, do I need to know what it is?”
“It’s small and it will be wrapped. Bring it back to me. I want it.”
“Okay.”
“And when you get back, we’ll settle things with Cameron,” she said. “The boys are onside?”
“No problem.”
“Would Waru be okay with our burying Cameron in one of his back fields?”
“Shouldn’t be an issue,” Perkasa said without hesitation.
“Then could you ask the brothers to dig a hole — a deep hole — while you’re off getting Cameron’s things?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
“I have to say, Ava, you’ve made quite an impression on them.”
“That wasn’t the intention,” she said.
Prayogo came back into the house carrying the mobile in his hand.
Ava looked at her watch. “Let’s get started.”
( 35 )
Cameron was slumped in the chair, his chin resting on his chest. Ava shook him. “I need water,” he said, twitching as he woke.
“After you make the phone call to Yannie, you can have all the water you want,” she said. “Now what’s the number?”
She punched it in as he recited it. She held off hitting the last digit and she said, “Andy, remember what I told you — no funny stuff. You’re sending someone from the golf course to get the gift. Just tell her where it is and tell her to get it ready for pickup. Nothing more. Not one word extra.”
“I know,” he said.
Ava hit the last number and held the phone loosely to his ear so she could hear it ring. On the third ring a woman picked up. “Hello, Pak Andy.”
He spoke quickly. “Yannie, I’m at the golf course and I have to go back to play in a minute, so listen carefully. I left a pair of green jade cufflinks on my dresser. They’re a gift for a friend’s birthday. He’s here with me and I want to give them to him later this afternoon. I’ve asked one of the men from the golf club to come by and pick them up. Could you wrap them, please?”
Ava heard Yannie’s voice and knew she was asking a question.
“No, I don’t need a card. Just the gift,” Cameron said.
The housekeeper spoke again. Cameron looked up at Ava. “She’s asking the name of the person going to the house,” he said.
Ava glanced at Perkasa.
“Tell her Tedjo is coming,” he said.
“He’s called Tedjo,” Cameron said.
Say goodbye, Ava mouthed.
“I have to go now. I’ll talk to you later,” said Cameron.
Ava hung up the phone and put the tape back on Cameron’s mouth. “Well done.” She motioned for Perkasa to follow her into the kitchen. “Who is Tedjo?” she asked.
“A guy in Jakarta I don’t like.”
She smiled. “How long do you think it will take you to get back and forth from Cameron’s house?”
“About an hour, give or take.”
“Call me as soon as you leave there, as soon as you have the gift and the suitcase.”
“I will.”
“And talk to the boys about digging that hole.”
“Right now.”
Perkasa called to Waru and Prayogo to come into the house and Ava replaced them on the porch. Cameron was slumped over again, unconscious or close to it. Ava wondered if he was playing possum and nudged his naked knee with the toe of her shoe. He didn’t budge.
She looked at him and wondered what Fay would think of him now. Without the gel in his hair, the fashionable spikes were gone, exposing balding temples. The wet shirt pressed against his torso, and the fact that he was sitting made his belly look twice as big as it probably was. His legs were thin, white, the knees knobby. Then there were his genitals, shrunken now, as if retreating inside his body to avoid any more pain.
He’s pathetic, Ava thought. The cocky, sneaky little Scotsman reduced to a whimpering mess with two flicks of the picana. It shouldn’t have been so easy. If he had any guts he would have resisted for longer. But then, if he had any guts he wouldn’t have drugged her.
Waru and Prayogo came out of the house, nodded at Ava, and then went around the side. When they re-emerged, they were both carrying shovels. They walked in a straight line away from the house towards a cluster of palms and stopped in the shade of the trees. Waru dragged the tip of his shovel across the surface of the earth, making a rectangle. They began to dig, the soft reddish brown soil flying in the air.
In a few hours she’d be on a plane back to Hong Kong, back to a different reality. Surabaya and Andy Cameron would be behind her. But had she really purged herself of him? Maybe not completely, but enough that she knew she could move on.
Ava looked at her watch. If Perkasa’s schedule was accurate, she could get to the airport with enough time to get caught up with the rest of her life — a life she hadn’t thought about since Saturday morning, a life she now felt the strongest urge to reconnect with. She needed things to be normal; she wanted to be surrounded by familiarity.
Then, as if on cue, her phone sounded. The caller ID showed a Chinese area code — Wuhan. May Ling Wong. Ava let it ring through to voicemail. The job isn’t done, she told herself. May would have to wait until the job was done.
In the distance she could see the brothers in the hole, their heads bobbing up and down as they bent to dig and then popped up to toss dirt over the side. She thought about telling them that the hole was deep enough, but then realized they might know more about that kind of thing than she did.
She closed her eyes and thought about Hong Kong. She’d spend a few days there. See her father. Congratulate Amanda and Michael. See Uncle. Should she contact his doctor? If she did, what story could she possibly tell that would get him to disclose Uncle’s medical condition? The last time she had talked to Sonny, it seemed clear enough that it was the right thing to do. Now she wasn’t so sure. Everyone had secrets, and they were entitled to keep them.
Her attention was drawn to the sound of voices. She looked up and saw Waru and Prayogo walking back towards the house. They had left the shovels by the side of the hole. Then her phone rang and she recognized Perkasa’s number.
“I have the gift and the suitcase,” he said.
“Passport?”
“It’s in the case.”
“Any problems with the housekeeper?”
“No.”
“Good,” said Ava. “The boys have just finished here with that piece of work we needed done and are almost back at the house. I’m going to pass my phone to Waru. Tell him to give me that equipment I need.”
He hesitated. “Ava, are you sure you want to do this? I don’t mind doing it myself.”
“My job, my decision,” she said.
“Then give him the phone.”
As the two men spoke, Ava approached Cameron. He wasn’t moving. She shook him b
y an arm until his head lifted from his chest. “Can you hear me?” she said.
He nodded.
“Okay, we’re going to be leaving here in a minute. We all can use a little air conditioning. I have to keep you blindfolded but I’ll take the tape from your mouth, and I’m going to free your legs so you can walk. When we get to where we’re going, we’ll get your money organized, and then we’ll be on our way,” she said, reaching out and tearing the tape from his mouth. “Now, Andy, you aren’t going to do anything stupid, are you?”
“What do you mean?” he croaked.
“Go to the police.”
“And tell them what, that I was kidnapped by the police? Good luck with that.”
“Or talk to your bosses.”
“Never,” he said.
She believed him, or at least she believed that in that moment he meant what he said.
Waru stood in the doorway, the gun in his hand. The sight of it made her shudder. A memory from Macau crashed into her head. She went to the door and took the gun from him. It was a Glock 22, as close to standard police issue as you could get. She’d fired one before, but never in these circumstances.
“I’m going to sit inside for a moment,” she said to Waru, gesturing to make herself understood. “Watch him until I come back.”
She sat at the kitchen table and tried to steady herself. In Macau she had shot Lok, a Triad member, in the head at close range. It was the first time she had killed anyone for any reason other than immediate self-defence. It had bothered her enormously, but in the months since she had found ways to rationalize her actions. Now she was going to do it again.
The gun lay on the table beside her right hand. Ava watched her fingers tremble. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she whispered.
She heard a shout from the porch. She stood up, the gun in her hand. It became quiet outside and she sat down again. Procrastinating isn’t going to make this any easier, she told herself. There was no choice, she knew. Leaving him alive would put everyone at risk: the brothers, Perkasa, John and Fay Masterson, her, maybe even Uncle. Still she waited, gathering herself.
Then Waru was at the door, shouting at her in Indonesian, pointing back towards the porch. She ran out to him, the gun in her hand.
Waru was standing next to Cameron. The Scotsman’s head was slumped onto his chest and he wasn’t moving. She walked over to Cameron and held her hand against his mouth and nose. She couldn’t feel his breath. She lifted his chin, reached for his neck and searched for a pulse. Then she grabbed his wrist and pressed her fingers into the artery there. Nothing.
“He’s dead,” she said to Waru.
He ran his hand across his throat in a slicing motion.
Ava nodded.
“What’s going on?” Perkasa said.
She turned and saw him emerging from the kitchen. Either the trip from Cameron’s house had been very fast or Ava had lost all sense of time while she was thinking about what she needed to do.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He seems to have had a heart attack or a stroke.”
“Fat, out of shape, stressed, cooked by the sun — I’m not surprised,” Perkasa said, and then looked at the gun in her hand. “It was nice of him to save us the trouble.”
“We need to bury him,” Ava said.
“Is the hole dug?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll tell the boys to get him into the ground.”
( 36 )
Ava and Perkasa sat in the Nissan with the air conditioning running. Neither of them had said much since the brothers left the porch with Cameron. Waru had taken him by the ankles, Prayogo by his wrists, and they had carried him back to the palm trees, where they tossed him into the ground. It took longer than Ava would have imagined to return the dirt to its rightful place.
Perkasa gave her the small wrapped box he had picked up at Cameron’s house. She put it into her bag, ignoring the questions in his eyes. He showed her the luggage the housekeeper had packed: a blue nylon suitcase. She checked the nametag. Cameron had been a member of Star Alliance.
When the brothers finally emerged from the house, Ava waved them over to the Nissan. She gave each of them two U.S. hundred-dollar bills. She knew that was probably equivalent to a month’s salary. Whatever it was, and whatever else they were being paid by Perkasa, they had been worth every dollar. They smiled at her and then spoke to Perkasa.
“They say thank you very much, and now they want to know what the next plan is.”
“You, me, and Waru will drive to the airport in the Nissan. He’d better come inside with us and make sure you have no problems at check-in. Prayogo can drive the Porsche; tell him to put it in long-term parking. Then he can join us inside the terminal. You will get on the plane to Singapore and I’ll catch mine to Hong Kong, and we’ll try to forget any of this happened today.”
It took them an hour to drive back into the city and then south to the airport. Ava had moved to the back seat, her thoughts now on Hong Kong. Perkasa sat in the front with Waru, the two men chatting and laughing as if they were the ones who had just finished a game of golf. Behind the Nissan, Prayogo trailed in the Porsche.
They were ten minutes from the airport when Perkasa turned to Ava. “Do you have a confirmation number for me?”
“Oh, yes, I almost forgot,” she said, reaching into her bag.
She passed him the slip of paper she’d written it on. “What are you going to do when you get to Singapore? Get on the first plane back to Jakarta?”
“Maybe, but maybe I’ll stay there for a few days.”
“Do you need any more money?”
“No, I’ve told you, Uncle sent more than enough.”
Ava looked out the window as Surabaya slid by. She would never come back to the city, she knew. It was going to be struck from her mind, dispatched like Cameron.
“You were great to work with,” she said. “So were the brothers. Please make sure they know how much I appreciate everything they did.”
“They know. The two hundred dollars you gave them meant a lot.”
Waru drove the Nissan into the airport’s short-term lot and Prayogo peeled off and headed for the long-term. When they disembarked from the car, Waru reached for Ava’s bags. She shook her head but he insisted.
They stopped just inside the terminal, Waru looking around in all directions. The two Indonesians exchanged words. “He’s looking for his contact,” Perkasa said.
The contact found them — a short, middle-aged woman in a Singapore Air uniform who walked into the terminal through the same door they had used. She tapped Waru on the shoulder and he spun around, to be greeted by a hug. They exchanged words and then she said to Ava, “Are you travelling with us as well?”
“No, I’m going in a different direction.”
“Here is my confirmation number and the passport I want to use,” Perkasa said to her, handing over the paper Ava had given him. The paper was on top of a stack of rupiah notes.
She put the money in her pocket. “Good. Now follow me over to the check-in counter and we’ll get you settled. I’ll look after everything personally,” she said, looking at the passport, “Mr. Cameron.”
Waru spoke to Perkasa. “He says she’s the supervisor,” Perkasa translated for Ava.
Ava spotted the Cathay Pacific counter further down the terminal. “I’ll get my own boarding pass and meet you back here,” she said.
Uncle had booked her into first class and there was no lineup at that counter. Within five minutes she was back at the spot where she’d left the men. Perkasa and Waru joined her almost at once. “She’s going to take me to the lounge and then wait there with me until boarding. She’ll personally clear me at the gate,” he said.
“What will you do with the bag in Singapore?” she asked.
“I thought I’d put it in a storage locker at the airport.”
“Destroy the passport.”
“Of course.”
Ava hesitated, trying to think of
anything she’d missed, and then she remembered Cameron’s phone. It was still in her bag. She took it out and gave it to Perkasa. “Call the housekeeper from the lounge and tell her Cameron just came off the golf course and is going to Singapore. And then lose the phone when you land.”
Prayogo came into the terminal and headed towards them. He handed the Porsche keys to Perkasa, who in turn looked at Ava. “Lose them with the phone,” she said.
“There could be some noise here about Cameron disappearing. Do you want Waru to keep his ears open and let us know what’s going on?”
“The Italians won’t go to the police, and they’ll discourage anyone associated with him from doing that.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Still . . .”
“If he hears our names connected to Cameron’s, call me. Otherwise, let it be.”
“Okay.”
The supervisor hovered just out of earshot. “It looks like she wants to get you to the lounge,” Ava said.
Perkasa nodded. “It’s been one helluva twenty-four hours.”
( 37 )
Ava slept most of the way to Hong Kong, and when she woke, she knew things were different.
It had started while she sat in the business lounge at Juanda International. She reached for her phone to call Toronto and then realized it was five a.m. there. No one would be answering.
She thought about calling May Ling, then hesitated. Things would get personal — they always got personal. Ava wasn’t sure how well she could handle that. Not now, anyway.
So she phoned Uncle and, almost to her relief, went to voicemail. “It’s done. I’m at the airport in Surabaya and my flight is on time,” she said.
She had a glass of champagne when she boarded the flight and then downed two glasses of a French white burgundy as soon as cabin service began. She refused dinner, reclined her seat, put on an eye mask, and fell into a dreamless sleep.
She woke about half an hour out from Hong Kong, a flight attendant hovering over her, offering a hot towel. Ava took it, laid it over her face, and scrubbed, lightly at first and then vigorously, as if trying to wipe off any last remnants of Surabaya. The South China Sea glittered below, her familiar pathway to Hong Kong. Toronto was only a few days away.