by Jake Needham
A motorcycle roared by. It was a big bike and noisy, although not knowing one kind of motorcycle from another the model didn’t register on me. All I could remember later was that it had been purple with a lot of chrome and that it had a steeply swept-back windshield with two huge rear-view mirrors sticking out from its sides.
The rider, like most motorcycle riders in Thailand, wore a helmet with an opaque visor that entirely obscured his features. He also wore jeans and a dark, nondescript jacket zipped up in front. It was one of those free jackets that companies gave to motorcycle taxi drivers for the advertising. Later, thinking back, I realized I had seen yellow lettering on the back of the jacket that said The Wall Street Journal Asia.
After passing us the bike pulled into the lane directly in front of the Jag and almost immediately started slowing down. Our driver tapped his brake and I saw Plaid Shirt’s shoulders stiffen as he sat up straighter, his eyes on the motorcycle. I glanced at Mia, but she was still staring out the side window. She was either entirely unaware of the motorcycle or perhaps just disinterested in it.
I bent forward and looked through the gap between Plaid Shirt and the driver. The motorcycle slowed down some more and our driver blipped his horn. The cyclist turned his head back toward us pointing to the bike’s engine, and for a moment I saw the leaping chrome Jaguar at the tip of the car’s hood reflected in the black mirror of his visor. Our driver lifted both hands from the steering wheel, wheeling them impatiently, a gesture that struck me for some reason as more Italian than Irish.
The motorcycle coughed and choked, then all of a sudden caught again with a loud growl and the cyclist roared away. Barely fifty yards later, it stalled again and the rider turned sharply as if he were trying to get clear of us and off the road to the shoulder. But when he was squarely in front of us, the big bike came to an abrupt halt.
The rider kicked at the starter as we rolled toward him, his helmeted head rotating back and forth between his bike and our Jaguar. Our driver cursed and braked sharply, and he banged the horn again. I saw Plaid Shirt and the driver exchange a look. I couldn’t see what kind of a look it was, but I could guess.
I leaned further forward, lowering my head and keeping my voice down in order not to alarm Mia.
“Don’t stop,” I said.
“Huh?” The driver glanced back at me.
“They use motorcycles here,” I said.
“Who does?” Plaid Shirt asked.
“Hired gunmen. Hitters. They do business from bikes. They…”
But my words were lost in the roar of another powerful motorcycle closing on the Jaguar from behind.
At the same instant we heard it coming, the motorcyclist in front of us started his bike and in one smooth movement turned it directly toward us. He jerked a weapon from inside his jacket— I think it was a MAC-10, but I couldn’t be sure — and pointed it directly into the windshield. The other bike slid to a stop next to the rear window where Mia sat.
Realizing now what was happening, both Plaid Shirt and the driver produced handguns from somewhere. Before they could bring them into play, the motorcyclist in front of us fired two brief bursts from his rifle. The first blew out the Jaguar’s windscreen. The second caught both Plaid Shirt and the driver in the faces, shattering their skulls like two eggshells. A fine mist of blood and tissue filled the car, swirling through it as if a tiny storm of pink rain had just passed over us.
In his death convulsions, the driver must have pushed the Jaguar’s accelerator to the floor because the car leaped forward, smashing straight into the surprised motorcyclist in front of us. The heavy car plowed over the man and his bike, grinding them both into the road. In a shower of sparks, the gunman, his motorcycle, and the heavy Jaguar grated along the asphalt until the whole mass crashed off the road and down into a narrow drainage ditch, pinning the gunman and his wildly roaring bike underneath the weight of the engine block. The impact dislodged the driver’s foot from the accelerator and the pile of wreckage stopped there, tilting nose-down into the ditch.
The force of smashing into the shooter and then toppling down into the drainage ditch threw me forward and to the left, leaving me more in the front seat than the back. I could feel a sting as if a knife had slashed my cheek and the unmistakable warm wetness of blood. I knew I hadn’t been hit. I must have caught a ricochet from somewhere.
The front passenger door hung open and instinctively I hauled myself further forward to get to it. Twisting around to pull my legs under me, I looked back at Mia who was strangely silent. Then I saw why. The second motorcyclist must have fired, too, although I didn’t remember hearing any gunfire other than from the front.
Mia sat almost straight upright in spite of the list of the car, but there was a neat crescent of entry wounds stitched high into her chest. Her mouth hung open and her eyes stared through the empty space where the car’s side window had been not so very long before.
Struggling for purchase in the blood soaking Plaid Shirt’s body, I grunted as something dug into my stomach. Pushing my hand under me, I felt a heavy automatic, a .45 that either Plaid Shirt or the driver had dropped. I wrapped my hand around its grip.
I slid downward and toward the open door, skidding through the blood as if I were belly down on ice. My elbow hit the ground first, then my shoulder, but I held onto the .45 and rolled, pulling my legs free of the car and curling them under me.
The Jaguar’s sudden lurch forward had caught the second motorcyclist by surprise, but now he roared up on the side of the car opposite me and raked it efficiently with short bursts. Glass shattered and popped and bullets pinged into the metal skin of the car with a sound like bells gone mad. When the shooter’s magazine was empty, a silence fell that was more terrible than the noise of the crash, worse even than the glass and metal of the Jaguar ripping open in a storm of bullets.
And in that silence I knew with absolute certainty the other shooter would be coming. He was in no hurry. He would not leave until he had examined each body to make certain we were all dead.
From near the rear of the car I heard the characteristic clack-clack of a magazine being replaced and I went prone as silently as I could, my arms extended out in front of me.
Twisting my hand to examine the pistol in it, I saw the safety was off and it was cocked. I said a silent thank you to whichever of the security men had been quick enough to get me at least that far before he died. The rest was up to me.
I took a deep breath, willed my fingers of my right hand to relax on the grip, and nestled the butt into the palm of my left hand for stability.
There was a sudden movement just in front of me followed by a crash. I almost fired, but I didn’t. The shooter had thrown a hubcap out from behind the car and it had caught the rear tire and ricocheted off some rocks before rolling into the drainage ditch. Whoever he was, he was a professional and he was cautiously probing for any sign of survivors before he ventured closer to the wreckage.
A few moments later there was another sudden explosion of noise and a dozen jets of dirt shot into the air from the bank of the ditch behind me. The gunman was firing over the top of the car, still probing around for survivors.
I held my fire. I didn’t move.
Move? I could barely breathe. I was damned near petrified with terror. I probably couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to.
Then, all at once, there was a sudden flash of black right in front of me, like a dark curtain closing across the landscape.
It was the gunman, diving out from behind the car, tumbling toward the cover of the ditch.
Time seemed to slow for me. I always thought time slowing was just something that happened in the movies; but it isn’t, and it did.
Somewhere inside my head I heard my old instructor speaking to me in calm, clear voice and I followed his directions. With the front sight of the .45, I tracked just ahead of the black mass. I raised the back sight until the blade nestled perfectly into the notch in the front sight. I squeezed the trigger,
twice, in rapid succession.
The noise of the big .45 exploded all around me. I had no idea it would be so loud. The sound reached right down deep into my chest, grabbed me by the heart, and squeezed until I thought it would stop beating.
The gunman hit the ground with a thud that vibrated through the earth all the way to where I lay a dozen feet away. For several long minutes after that he did not move. Nor did I.
When finally I started to crawl cautiously toward him, his black helmet lifted all at once and he twisted toward me.
I fired twice more.
The man’s body shuddered with the impacts. The helmet bent unnaturally to one side and then fell back against the ground. He did not move again.
Keeping the .45 centered on the man’s helmet, I reached out slowly with my free hand. When my fingers touched the curving magazine of his rifle, I wrapped them around it and jerked the gun away. His limp hand gave it up without a struggle and flopped against the ground.
Pulling myself around until I was half sitting and half leaning on my left hand, I put down the .45 and unsnapped the strap of the man’s helmet. Then I slipped my hand underneath the visor and wrenched it off his head.
Blood was coming from the man’s nose and one of his ears, but his eyes were frozen and open. The hard black pupils stared at me in death with the same emptiness they had stared at me in life.
I examined Marcus York’s bloody face for a moment or two.
Then I passed out.
FORTY TWO
WHEN I OPENED my eyes the world looked dim and watery. It was as if I were diving and a long, long way beneath the surface.
I tried to move my head, but my neck muscles ignored me and nothing happened. Before long, I gave up. Using only my eyes, I scouted my surroundings as well as I could.
Everywhere I seemed to be looking through water. Down at the far edge of my vision I could see bits of what appeared to be yellow seaweed streaming upward from the sea bottom, long slender tentacles of plant life waved gracefully in the unseen currents like those Nebraska wheat fields they show on television when they play “America the Beautiful” before a football game. I could hear nothing at all except for a slight rushing in my ears. That seemed more or less consistent with being underwater, too, so cautiously I focused my consciousness on my chest and took stock of how the breathing process was going for me.
My lungs seemed to be working just fine. I could feel my chest rising and falling as they went about their work of pumping the air reliably in and out with what seemed to be their usual efficiency. Still, I thought they might be doing it somewhat more slowly than they had before…
Before?
Before what?
I couldn’t remember.
All of a sudden a face loomed in front of mine, a woman’s face, watery and wavering, but still real and so close I could touch her. I tried to touch her, but my arm muscles were working no better than my neck muscles had been and I couldn’t.
Anita? I called out to the face. Is that you, Anita? But the face didn’t answer.
Of course, it had to be Anita, but…
I fought my hazy memory, skirmishing with it in slow motion, and I felt myself moving toward something. I willed my eyes to focus on the face. I struggled to capture a clear image of it, one that I could lay next to the picture of Anita’s face that I carried always in my mind.
I could not do it. The face started to move away.
Wait! I shouted. Come back!
But the face slid beyond the edge of my vision and disappeared.
I thought about it for a moment and then I realized that I should hardly be surprised.
She couldn’t hear you, I told myself. You can’t shout underwater.
Underwater?
There it was again. The only idea I seemed to be able to grasp clearly. The only thought I could hold onto. I was underwater and yet I was still breathing just as if I were on dry land.
Abruptly there was a flash of motion off in the corner of my vision and I had a sensation of a brilliant golden light being born. Emergent and intensifying, it seemed to be pushing straight toward me. Frantically, I twisted my eyes as far as I could, searching desperately for the source. I found it and focused on it, and saw a fish coming directly toward me. A giant goldfish.
A fish? A goldfish?
Ah, shit, I thought, you’re not underwater.
You’re dead, man.
You’re dead and you’ve gone to the place where people go when they die, and this is it.
But I was so tired, I could only hold a single thought clearly. And it was this.
If that were true, if I was dead, then there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
So I closed my eyes and waited for whatever came next.
THE NEXT TIME I woke up and opened my eyes, the world looked different. A lot different.
I was in a darkened hospital room and in the gray dimness a faint glow of artificial light came from somewhere. This time when I tried to move, I found my neck muscles worked pretty well. I rolled my head in the direction of the light, then waited for my eyes to focus.
When they did I found myself looking into a softly lighted aquarium with tiny plantings of yellow sea grass lining its sandy bottom. I could hear the aquarium’s air pump humming in the background and a goldfish that seemed to me to be the size of a housecat was bumping against the glass side of the tank.
“Are you awake, Jack?” The woman’s voice came from the other side of my bed, the one opposite the aquarium. “Can you hear me?”
Slowly I rolled my head back. The woman had a nice face, but it was not Anita’s face. An Asian face instead. Dark hair, dark eyes, and skin that made me think of looking into a cup of café au lait.
At first I couldn’t put a name to the face, although I was sure I knew it. I swam upward through memory, groping for it.
Then I could put a name to it.
Kate.
It was Kate’s face.
“Where am I?” I asked her.
“The hospital,” she said. “You’ve been shot, but you’ll be fine.”
I kept gazing at Kate’s face.
“What are you staring at?” she eventually asked.
“You look so Thai, but you sound…so English.”
Kate laughed and it was a lovely laugh, throaty and warm. “Does that bother you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I was only thinking that…well, thank God it’s not the other way around.”
Kate thought about that for a second and then started laughing again, this time sticking her tongue into the corner of her mouth in mock disapproval. “I gather your sense of humor has survived pretty much intact,” she said.
I started to say something smooth and witty, then all at once everything that had happened to me came back. In a single fast-forwarding rush, it all came back.
“How long have I been out?” I asked.
“A little over twelve hours,” Kate said. “We were worried about you there for a while.”
“It was just a scratch on the cheek,” I said.
“Hardly,” Kate said. “You were shot twice. Once in the left side just below your heart and once in the left arm. The arm was only a flesh wound, but the other shot did some damage. You lost a lot of blood. You might have bled to death if we hadn’t found you when we did.”
I tried to take all that in, but I couldn’t get my arms around it. It didn’t really make any sense to me.
“It was just a scratch,” I repeated doggedly.
“As soon as you came in, they got the bleeding stopped and the bullet out of your abdomen. I know the surgeon. He’s a good man and he says there is no major damage to any organs.”
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
“When you feel like it, I’d very much like to hear what you do remember.”
I took a deep breath, pushed hard against the bottom, and rose all the way up until I broke through the surface.
“Now is okay,” I said.
/>
FORTY THREE
I THOUGHT FOR a moment and did my best to clear my head. Then I told Kate about the motorcycle pulling in front of us and the other bike coming up from behind. I told her about the Jaguar jerking forward and smashing over the first gunman, and I told her about killing the second shooter with the .45 before I passed out. Something told me not to mention pulling off the man’s helmet and recognizing Marcus York’s face, at least not quite yet, so I left that part out.
“Where did you learn to shoot like that?” Kate asked.
“I used to play tennis with some DEA agents in Washington. They took me to ranges sometimes. Just screwing around. They said I had a knack for it.”
A short silence fell after that. I was pretty badly muddled, but I was lucid enough to probe Kate gently, just to see where it might go.
“Who were those guys anyway?” I asked her.
“We don’t know yet. No ID on either of them, of course. They might have been local hitters, but probably not. More than likely imported. Malaysian, would be my guess.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Well…they looked more Malaysian than Thai to me, but I’m just guessing.”
That stopped me.
“You saw the bodies?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And they were both Asians?”
“That’s right. So if you’re wondering whether the marshals had anything to do with this, I think the answer is no. I doubt they would have trusted a couple of local hired guns.”
There was no way in hell Kate could have mistaken Marcus York for a Malaysian. If she was telling me the truth, somebody removed York’s body and substituted another one before she got there. On the other hand, maybe Kate was lying to me. Maybe she had seen York’s corpse and she thought I hadn’t, so she didn’t want me to know.